A worthwhile memoir about hearing impairment and struggling with the complex medical community.
After losing most of his hearing in 2010, a journalist’s frustration mounted as insurance and the medical community entangled him in red tape.
As a music lover who had spent much of his career in coverage and criticism of popular culture, Holston faced a shocking transition when he awoke one morning to discover that he could barely hear anything. Though there had been warning signs—hearing aids and measurable loss—this was sudden, unexpected, and close to absolute. Thus began an extended period of difficult adjustment: communicating at work with colleagues by email and pen on paper, navigating marital turbulence, dealing with strangers who didn’t understand his condition or who thought he lacked mental capacity. But the biggest issue was trying to figure out what had happened and how to fix it. Doctors weren’t absolutely sure on the former, and their attempts to address the latter caused even more frustration when an expensive cochlear implant failed to help. This left the author wondering “whether something was still wrong with me systemically, something as yet undetected that was rendering the implant less effective, or whether the implant itself might be a problem.” Consultations with other doctors meant he had to go out of his insurance network, and haggling over the phone became nearly impossible due to his condition. This book is partly about how hearing loss affects every aspect of one’s life, partly about how dealing with insurance can make life a living hell, and partly about the effects on a marriage from such unexpected strains. “Years of writing and columnizing on a daily basis had made writing reflexive to me,” writes Holston. “I try not to let any experience go to waste. To paraphrase an old saying, that which doesn’t kill you makes for a good story.” An appendix includes useful information about the benefits and risks of cochlear implants.
A worthwhile memoir about hearing impairment and struggling with the complex medical community.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5107-4687-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
