A powerful, direct examination of memory and suffering.
Frank account of the autoimmune disorder that consumed the author in her 20s.
The disease that plagued her in various ways for nine years had ravaging effects on Rome Prize winner Manguso (Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, 2007, etc.), whose poetry and prose have never shied away from staring a subject in the face. In short chapters of slim paragraphs buffered by white spaces bearing as much emotive force as the poetic statements they insulate, she carefully unfurls the details of her eventual diagnosis of CIDP (chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy), akin to Guillain-Barré syndrome. Manguso’s condition first manifested in February 1995 as a head cold that wouldn’t quit; by March it had escalated to numb feet and almost complete paralysis. She landed in the hospital and underwent her first apheresis, a four-hour procedure that took her blood’s plasma (whose “devil antibodies” were stripping the myelin from her peripheral nerves and causing paralysis), removed it and replaced it with the plasma of others. The author endured more than 20 of these vampiric procedures before a central line was surgically implanted in her chest and a new neurologist recognized that curative treatment didn’t involve apheresis but steroid and gamma globulin therapy. Manguso’s abundant analytic and compositional gifts are evident throughout this harrowing memoir, from her expressions of hard-won appreciation for the relativity of suffering to a nuanced account of how serious illness can alter one’s conception of time, robbing the afflicted of both compassion and accurate recall. “I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly,” she writes. “There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.”
A powerful, direct examination of memory and suffering.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-28012-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
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
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