A hopeful and heart-gladdening memoir.
Meck cobbles together fragments of her life after a traumatic brain injury.
Living with her husband, Jim, and their two toddler boys in Texas, the author’s life changed dramatically in 1988 when a ceiling fan fell on her head. She passed out, and the paramedic’s penlight showed one dilated pupil, one shrunk, and no response to pricks to her fingers and toes. Meck slipped into a coma, and the family prepared for her passing, but she pulled through. However, she had full loss of her episodic memory (recollections of specific events from one’s lived experience) and a good portion of her semantic memory (the recollection of facts; she had about a 100-word vocabulary and was confounded by a fork), and her procedural memory was about as developed as a reptile’s. Meck’s narrative, written with the assistance of award-winning journalist de Visé, moves forward in fits and starts; for years, she lived in a hazy world, unable to read (she learned along with her sons), falling out of chairs, suffering bouts of dizziness and blackouts, and forgetting faces almost instantaneously, including her husband's and children’s. She tried in vain to mimic other peoples’ actions, and she could not discern the function of a hairbrush or how a drinking cup works. Meck relates these tortured years of slowly gathering herself together, then dropping a step or two back, with an unmodulated inflection. She was baffled by routine, feigned comprehension, was pained by sex—though she did have the saving grace of a fast blossoming of love between mother and children. There has been progress on many fronts, she writes, but most days are still a struggle. “Part of me realizes that I will never really know exactly what I was like before my head injury,” she writes, “but another part of me stubbornly refuses to give up as I try desperately to fit pieces together in an ever-changing life-size puzzle.”
A hopeful and heart-gladdening memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8581-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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