Poet and Bakeless Prize winner Nealon (Immaculate Fuel, 2004, etc.) poetically writes about her close-knit Irish-American family and her vocation for healing.
As a young girl, after enjoying a biography of Molly Pitcher, the author dreamed of accomplishing great deeds in the medical field. However, she writes, nursing school was actually a default option since her grades would not qualify her for a university scholarship. Tragically, her younger brother which whom she had an extremely close bond was diagnosed with a rare, difficult-to-treat cancer just after her graduation. Rather than seeking a job near her family home in New Jersey, she accepted a nursing job in Virginia because she couldn't face the possibility of her brother’s death. Only a year later, when her brother was near death, did she return home. Oppressed by guilt at the carefree life she had been living, Nealon writes about her painful realization that she had failed her family and especially her brother: “I had been in the wrong hospital. I had been at the wrong bedside.” Consequently, she took a job nursing young patients who had terminal cancers in the same hospital where her brother lay dying, and this was a turning point in her life. From then on, she was engaged in a search—for reconciliation with her parents and sister, who blamed her for leaving, for a lover who might take her brother's place, and for the spiritual sustenance she derived from nurturing cancer patients, caring for wave of early AIDS patients and treating the homeless. Simultaneously an elegiac memoir and a sparkling prose-poem.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55597-590-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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