With concussions from sports injuries making the news, Elliott’s easy-to-read account of his experiences is a valuable...
Up-close view of living with the harrowing effects of a concussion by a professor of artificial intelligence who kept thorough notes of the experience and shares what he learned about overcoming his severe disabilities.
When Elliott (DePaul Univ.) was concussed in a traffic accident, he soon discovered that the medical community, including neurologists, was ill-prepared to either recognize or treat the injury to his brain. Here, the author documents his medical encounters and what it was like living for years with a badly damaged brain—he had difficulties with balance, body sense, muscle control, memory, walking, hearing, seeing, eating, sleeping, his sense of time, and making decisions, plus seizures, nausea, and pain. He felt, he writes, like an alien living among humans. As he notes, the suicide rate among concussion sufferers is high. The previously high-functioning Elliott not only reveals his own brain’s limitations after the accident; he also examines the workings of a normal, healthy brain. Years after the injury, he learned of the work of Donalee Markus, a cognitive restructuring specialist working in the Chicago area. Markus used paper-and-pencil, context-free visual puzzles to help Elliott regain his cognitive functioning skills, and she referred him to Deborah Zelinsky, an optometrist who used a progression of nontraditional therapeutic eyeglasses to alter the way the brain conveys visual/spatial signals to the visual cortex. As the author explains, both approaches utilize the amazing plasticity of the human brain. Details of their approaches constitute the book’s final portion, and both women have provided informative forewords describing their work. Happily, under their programs, the author made large strides toward normalcy.
With concussions from sports injuries making the news, Elliott’s easy-to-read account of his experiences is a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the condition.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42656-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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