An uplifting, life-celebrating memoir written amid extremely difficult circumstances.
An Irish radio producer tells how she learned to live—and thrive—by the side of a beloved husband diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
When Fitzmaurice first met her filmmaker husband, Simon, she fell in love with a vitality and eloquence that expressed itself in his “dancing hands.” Together they built a bond that was both close and passionate. But during the first decade of living within the happy self-containment of her family “tribe,” Simon suddenly began to limp. Doctors later confirmed that he had MND, a condition that would render him mute and unable to move anything but his eyes. In poetic language, Fitzmaurice recounts the story of how she adjusted to living with a bedridden husband who communicated via an eye-activated computer program. A “merry band” of nurses and caregivers gradually became a permanent feature of her home, as did ventilators and other hospital equipment. Meanwhile, the author oversaw the colorful chaos of living with five small children. Yet at every step of her busy life, she remained all too aware that the only way she could control overwhelming sorrow was to “park it outside of small moments [of peace].” Looking outside the family unit that had once been all she needed to sustain her, Fitzmaurice joined a group of women she came to call “the Tragic Wives’ Swimming Club,” whose members included friends who coped with life-changing challenges that they or their loved ones were facing by diving into the bracing waters of the ocean. The near-constant emotional pain has never left the author, but her achievement, both in life and in this book, is to show the renewing force that her adopted “tribe” and daily swims ultimately became. Though irrevocably changed, Fitzmaurice came to see that the landscape of her life was still every bit as “surprising and beautiful” as it had ever been.
An uplifting, life-celebrating memoir written amid extremely difficult circumstances.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-158-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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