An eloquent and heartwarming memoir.
A poet/memoirist’s account of how he bonded with his first guide dog.
Kuusisto (Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, 2006, etc.) was born with exceptionally poor vision. However, because his mother and father believed he would have no future if he presented as blind, they “forcefully encouraged me to do absolutely everything sighted children did.” He went to school, attended college, and became a professor, all without learning Braille. But his world was also extremely circumscribed: the one thing he could not manage was travel outside of his small town. “I was a second rate traveler who didn’t know how to go places independently,” he writes. When, at age 38, he lost his teaching job, Kuusisto was forced to reckon with circumstances that demanded he change not only his lifestyle, but also his attitude toward being physically imperfect. His path led him to Guiding Eyes for the Blind, an organization that helps visually impaired people become more mobile by using guide dogs. The author began training with a “brilliant and silly” yellow Labrador named Corky, who had “the most comprehending face I’d ever met.” Over the span of a few months, he learned how to control Corky and feel the “dog-man confidence” that allowed him to move through public spaces with her. At the same time, Corky also forced Kuusisto to come face to face with a suppressed part of his identity. Gradually, he integrated the stubborn survivor he was with the new, “more refined man of the street” able to navigate urban mazes like New York City with ease. Most significantly, the author was able to leave behind the disability prejudices he had inherited from his parents and honor his own right to live an authentic life free of guilt and shame for being “deficient.” Kuusisto tells the poignant story of a midlife rebirth that led to self-acceptance and also celebrates human/animal interdependence and a “companionship [that] was intimate and richer than poems.”
An eloquent and heartwarming memoir.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8979-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
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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