Will inspire readers to live life to the fullest—and to sign an organ-donor card.
Memoirs of a survivor who wasn’t about to let a little thing like a heart transplant slow her down.
Perkins is a self-described “mountain girl” who loves physical activity, especially hiking and camping. From the day they met, she and husband Craig spent all their spare time and money pursuing adventures in the great outdoors. Then, she began to experience troubling symptoms like heart palpitations and shortness of breath. Cardiologists eventually determined that Perkins had picked up a virus that left her with an enlarged, scarred left ventricle and potentially fatal arrhythmia. These problems landed her in the hospital for weeks on end and eventually necessitated a transplant. Committed to staying fit and active, Perkins and her husband have in recent years scaled some of the world’s most awesome mountains, including Mt. Kilimanjaro. Though it makes a welcome contrast with fellow transplant survivor Amy Silverstein’s much more downbeat Sick Girl (2007), Perkins’s memoir does not merely chronicle a predictable triumph over the odds. Exciting mountaineering stories that will appeal to fans of Jon Krakauer share space with tender emotional passages. From her description of meeting Craig in college through her grateful account of the unstinting care he provided during her darkest days in the hospital, this is also the portrait of a marriage. The prose is variable. Sometimes Perkins grabs a cliché, and stale sentences like, “It was July 1992, my last days of innocence,” are all the more frustrating because many other passages are so vivid, bursting with fresh metaphors and images: “Our initial courtship was like cramming for a final exam.” Perkins emerges as a likable narrator, human and sympathetic with nary a touch of Pollyanna.
Will inspire readers to live life to the fullest—and to sign an organ-donor card.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7425-5877-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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