An inspiring, if overly cheerful, memoir.
A husband recounts his wife’s struggle with—and triumph over—cancer.
In 2003, while debut author Corner’s wife, Pam, was taking a walk with her future sister-in-law, she started to experience some discomfort in her chest and shortness of breath. She didn’t make much of it at first, but a trip to a doctor brought grim news: she had stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Armed with a battery of test results, the author and his wife went in search of a suitable physician, but initially, everyone they consulted delivered a bleak prognosis, bereft of hope. Then they found Dr. Sucai Bi, who, after ordering a bone marrow extraction, came up with a plan: chemotherapy, radiation, and a stem-cell transplant. Both the author and his wife took a hands-on approach to the medical process and became impressively knowledgeable about the human body—something that was a source of both pain and wonderment to them. Predictably, the aggressive treatments had a withering effect on Pam’s body; she lost weight, her hair, and her natural vivaciousness. But she never surrendered her optimism and fought relentlessly toward an ultimate recovery. Nearly six months later, Pam finally received an infusion of stem cells—a day that she now considers a symbol of renewal and that she now speaks of as a second birthday. After completing her remaining treatments, she regained her former robustness, and, in 2005, she was able to finish the New York City Marathon. The author’s remembrance is inarguably an inspiring one—despite daunting odds, the couple remained remarkably sanguine about their prospects. Corner’s prose, however, can be overwritten and sentimental at times (“Our heroine successfully traverses the vastness of the unknown as she meets the challenge of a lifetime”), and his accounts of exchanges with his three young daughters are cloyingly sweet. Indeed, the book’s unremitting hopefulness is simultaneously a strength and a weakness. There also isn’t much reflection of a darker nature—the text only sparingly confronts the issue of Pam’s mortality, for example—and as a result, this brief recollection may not resonate strongly with many other cancer survivors.
An inspiring, if overly cheerful, memoir.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7491-0
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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