A compassionate mother-daughter memoir written with inspiration, empathy and hope.
The story of a mysterious medical ailment that blindsided a tightly knit family.
Jackson, a successful cosmetics entrepreneur, writes in her prologue about surviving a turbulent, insecure childhood fraught with emotional neglect and exacerbated by a violent sexual assault she endured as a teenager. These experiences seem to have prepared her to deal with the sudden onset in her teenage daughter, Ali, of an extremely rare, crippling autoimmune disorder called Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disease, which attacks the optic nerve and the central nervous system. Ali’s eyesight and pain levels worsened, and she was given four or five years to live. Jackson shifted into “warrior mode” and began canvassing the Los Angeles medical community for answers. A stay at the Minnesota Mayo Clinic initiated several radical chemotherapy treatments, though each debilitating stage further compromised Ali’s youthful dreams of excelling on the tennis courts. Interwoven through mother’s and daughter’s individual accounts of shock, denial, resignation and eventual acceptance are lighter scenes in which Jackson appeals to holistic healers for alternative solutions to the needles and MRIs of traditional medicine. She leavens the unsettling details of her daughter’s daunting ordeal with a personal history of her romance with infomercial magnate Bill Guthy and her progression from Hollywood makeup artist to cosmetic guru. Fully immersing herself in Ali’s malady, Jackson became medically knowledgeable about an obscure disease and ultimately founded a charitable foundation for the education and eradication of NMO. The closing “Thriver’s Guide” by Ali provides a brief five-step plan for those coping with the ailment.
A compassionate mother-daughter memoir written with inspiration, empathy and hope.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1593157333
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vanguard/Perseus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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