Verbose at times but astonishing and inspirational nonetheless.
Ashburne’s debut memoir recounts her extraordinary journey toward recovery from the physical and emotional scars of a near-death experience with flesh-eating bacteria.
After three attempts to become pregnant via in vitro fertilization, Ashburne and her husband, Michael, were heartbroken to learn that she had an ectopic pregnancy. Ara was not completely surprised, though, as she had been experiencing intense pain in her lower abdomen. After the procedure to remove the pregnancy, Ara hoped to heal and move on with her life. However, her body continued to be wracked with pain even worse than before her surgery. Baffled, her doctors gave her a changing cocktail of pain relievers that had little or no effect. Not finding anything wrong, they eventually discharged Ara. At home, she was groggy and unresponsive, but when her pulse raced to 120 beats per minute, she was readmitted to the hospital. From there, things only got worse. Doctors discovered Ara had “[n]ecrotizing fasciitis and necrosis of the subcutaneous tissue and mild necrosis.” She was infected with a strain of bacteria that was destroying tissue in her abdomen. Over multiple procedures, doctors removed the diseased tissue, and although her internal organs were spared, the majority of her abdomen was removed. Ara was given drugs to paralyze and sedate her as well as to manage her pain. All the while, she experienced shockingly realistic, often violent delusions. Miraculously, Ara recovered from her ordeal and eventually returned home, but she was haunted by feelings of depression, even suicide. Her struggle to fully heal was nothing short of heroic. At times, Ara’s story is so horrific it may seem unbelievable. Yet the medical notations, specific drugs and dosages, and other information she includes more than uphold her veracity. Many readers may be uncomfortable with her exacting and lengthy detail, especially in regard to her delusions and feelings of utter helplessness in the hospital, but the reality those details impart will no doubt leave a lasting imprint. Ashburne survived the struggle by tackling one significant issue at a time. She sought therapy to work through issues of being sexually abused and tortured as a girl (memories which provided the fodder for her delusions at the hospital), she immersed herself in beauty on a trip to Paris, and she even got herself physically fit enough to ride a scooter across the country—solo.
Verbose at times but astonishing and inspirational nonetheless.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1503383647
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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