When Moss writes, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” other readers who aren’t feeling what they’re supposed to be feeling...
A graphic memoir by an author best known for her children’s books details the devastating effects of her husband’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on her entire family.
Though Moss has sold millions of books—particularly the Amelia’s Notebook series—she explains in the acknowledgments that “this book wasn’t easy to sell. Many agents and editors felt it was too dark or sad.” It is both of those, as the author subverts the stereotype of the noble caregiver and the patient whose fatal illness teaches everyone about the true meaning of life. Moss offers no clichéd heroism. “We’re told that major illness deepens us, makes us grateful for our lives,” she writes. “But for me, ALS doesn’t work that way. I’m not a bigger, nobler person and neither is [my husband] Harvey.” When Harvey received his diagnosis and quickly saw his health decline, he seemed to resent his wife’s attempts to help him or be closer to him. And she resented him back, not only for the impositions his illness made on her and his lack of appreciation, but for the way it altered the dynamic of the entire family. “But it’s not his disease,” she maintains, after he decreed that he would notify their children. “It’s rotting away at all of us,” writes Moss. “First it killed our marriage. Now it’s destroying our family. And then Harvey will die. What will be left of us?” Instead of the concern for Harvey that one would expect as a focus, the author is brutally honest about how hard she took his illness and how it affected her. There are brief flashes of a return of intimacy and connection between them—and sessions with a therapist provided some perspective—but it seems that only after his death could she truly reconnect with the husband she loved.
When Moss writes, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” other readers who aren’t feeling what they’re supposed to be feeling could well find comfort in a kindred spirit.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57324-698-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Conari Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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