by Andrea Wilson Woods ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 2019
A moving but uneven account of exceptional courage.
A teenager diagnosed with terminal cancer lives life to the fullest in this debut book.
Adrienne was 15 years old when she was diagnosed with an incurable form of liver cancer. She had been attending the Coachella music festival to see her favorite band, Jane’s Addiction, and returned complaining about severe pain beneath her right rib. Woods, her sister, who narrates this work, showed little sympathy, at first blaming her sibling’s discomfort on excesses at Coachella. When Adrienne visited a clinic, a concerned doctor suggested an immediate referral and tests. A physician’s subsequent diagnosis—stage 4 hepatocellular carcinoma that had metastasized to Adrienne’s lungs—was received with shock and disbelief. After discussing Adrienne’s chemotherapy schedule, Woods calculated that her sister had “at best…six to eight months to live.” Adrienne, who had previously suffered from bouts of depression, seized this opportunity to live life to the maximum. She attended The Tonight Show and afterward met Jay Leno and, more importantly, her idol, guitarist Dave Navarro, whom she saw again on her Make-A-Wish day. The format of the work, an account of the 147 days from Adrienne’s first symptoms to her death, places a poignant emphasis on the importance of each fleeting moment. Adrienne’s voice is one of powerful, teenage defiance. An excerpt from her journal reads: “Every fucking moment after this cancer is dead I am going to be alive.…I’m going to theme parks and swimming pools, taking hiking trips and camping adventures.” The bulk of the narrative, provided by Woods, is emotionally controlled and concise—remaining candid but with no particular flair: “That night is the first time I pray about the cancer. It’s hard to pray to an entity you don’t believe in.” Despite its slightly unconventional format, this volume offers little else to set it apart from others of a similar nature. Adrienne’s journal entries are sufficiently stirring to motivate others facing terminal illness to seize the day but make up only a fraction of the book. Illustrated with family photographs throughout, this memoir/biography is deeply sad with inspirational flashes.
A moving but uneven account of exceptional courage.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0459-9
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Build Your BLISSS
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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