A thoughtful, multithemed autobiography focused on the challenges of motherhood, with particular insight into health care...
In this memoir, a former aspiring actress chronicles her transformative journey dealing with a daughter’s brain tumor and a later-in-life foreign adoption.
In 1972, depressed and financially dependent on a husband she was in the process of divorcing, Goodman, then 35, was told that her 5-year-old daughter, Julie, had a brain tumor and likely only six months to live. Julie underwent brain surgery and radiation treatment, then chemotherapy, leaving her neurologically disabled. Defying doctors, Goodman tried patterning, a controversial therapy of manipulating body parts to stimulate motor development. She recruited volunteers to help perform this work in her New York City apartment, and Julie lived, with some improvement, for another 20 years. Goodman also realized she was gay; she had one long-term lesbian relationship and eventually abandoned her “frivolous dream of being an actress” for a new career as a hospital counselor. In her 50s, Goodman, once again single, adopted Cache, a 3-year-old girl from Guatemala, who ended up having behavioral issues due to early childhood abuse and, later, sexual trauma as an 11-year-old. Goodman sprang into action, sending Cache to wilderness camp and boarding school. While Goodman remains unsure of these decisions, Cache, whose writings are excerpted in this narrative, is now back home and exploring a makeup artist career. In her often heartbreaking account, Goodman makes note of the cantor’s reference at Julie’s funeral to the Jewish legend about “a mother who did everything possible to keep her child alive.” Goodman is indeed living proof of such dedication, an example to parents everywhere to stay engaged in their children’s care. Though at times digressive with extraneous personal detail, Goodman is also refreshingly honest about the hardships in her life. “I…was always amazed that there was more screaming left,” she says about her primal scream therapy. Among her range of experiences—Julie, Cache, her sexual identity—each episode could be the subject of a more finely tuned memoir. This impressive individual, however, has certainly earned the right to tell her story in its totality.
A thoughtful, multithemed autobiography focused on the challenges of motherhood, with particular insight into health care advocacy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494294441
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
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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