Emotional storytelling and an inadequate overview of America’s response to autism now and then makes for a quick, linear...
Part sentimental diary, part how-to study guide, Ziegler’s memoir traces a mother’s personal and political struggle in raising an autistic child.
After a brief summary of the Ziegler family tree and the author’s foray into motherhood, Ziegler gives the straightforward chronology of her daughter Mary Ann’s life before and after the young girl’s diagnosis with autism. Ziegler forgoes substantive discourse on the tribulations of raising an autistic child within the confines of the uninformed public sphere and instead focuses on Mary Ann’s emotional coming-of-age narrative. This heartfelt storytelling would be more effective without constant allusion to a greater goal—systemic change at the local and national levels of autistic care. Following Mary Ann through the public education system of ’70s America, Ziegler paints a portrait of an institution replete with troubled students yet entirely without the funding and understanding necessary to meet their needs. Mary Ann eventually moves from Ziegler’s house to a group home for disabled adults, enters the workforce and earns the title “Employee of the Year.” She also suffers abuse from an aide and then successfully testifies against him in court. Often, Ziegler likens her daughter’s interpretation of the world around her to that of poets and philosophers, but this renders Mary Ann an abstraction and removes her from the larger conversation regarding autism in America. Though the text discusses a handful of national conferences, the overturning of antiquated statutes and a guide to the autistic spectrum, crucial information is both sporadic and delayed. Ziegler evokes a warm response in readers toward Mary Ann, but not toward the overall cause. By the time the author explains—through bullet points—how and why we should take action in the battle to understand and help those in the autistic spectrum, we are lost in a haze of anecdotes and acronyms.
Emotional storytelling and an inadequate overview of America’s response to autism now and then makes for a quick, linear read without a significant payoff.Pub Date: May 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4502-2916-6
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
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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