A poetic and moving chronicle of loss.
A debut memoir about losing a husband to cancer.
In her riveting, harrowing chronicle, British artist and writer Coutts (Fine Art/Goldsmiths Coll.) recounts three years during which her husband, Independent chief art critic Tom Lubbock, succumbed to brain cancer. Lubbock’s own reflections on his illness appeared in that publication just two months before he died in January 2011. Coutts’ story, therefore, focuses less on her husband’s experience than on her own: as caretaker, mother to their irrepressible toddler son, and intermediary with friends, family, nurses, and doctors. Her immediate reactions were shock and fear. “We discover, or rather I do,” she writes, “that you cannot hold a state of fear for an extended time. Fear is a peak, not a plateau. Shock is a drug and at first it feels pure and elevated, yes. The unreal keeps all exalted.” But that exaltation quickly dissipated, and Coutts was left feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and, as time went on, angry. As Tom underwent two surgeries and repeated chemotherapy and radiation, she strove to make “an intellectual accommodation with death.” In emails to their many friends, which punctuate this poignant memoir, the couple admitted that the illness “affected us differently. It’s been a lot of strain for Marion, less so in some ways for Tom.” However, Tom’s upbeat personality only masked his obsession; he told Marion that he thought about his cancer all the time, “though,” she remarks, “you would never know it.” Tom eventually became physically weak, his mobility was compromised, he contracted pneumonia repeatedly, and convulsions recurred. Because the tumor was in the area of speech and language, it soon affected his ability to write and to communicate, and Coutts added to her tasks the frustrating job of interpreter. In the last months, when he was in pain, she could only guess “at its extent and urgency and guess what we can do to alleviate it.”
A poetic and moving chronicle of loss.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2460-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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