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A BRAIN WIDER THAN THE SKY

Name: A BRAIN WIDER THAN THE SKY
Author: Andrew Levy
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7250-3

A MIGRAINE DIARY

by Andrew Levy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2009

An impressive meditation on a devastating affliction.

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A better-than-average entry in the illness-memoir genre.

Levy (English, director of Writer’s Studio/Butler Univ.; The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves, 2005, etc.) suffers from migraine headaches. In this memoir/historical review/philosophical inquiry, he delivers an impressive amount of material that will certainly resonate with fellow sufferers. Migraines affect more than 30 million people in the United States, notes the author, but since they aren’t directly involved in deaths, doctors have never officially recognized the illness as a fatal disease. This is changing, however, as recent advances reveal distinct brain abnormalities and treatments that correct them. Since migraines are involved in one in five marriages, stress on the partner creates a second epidemic of depression, anxiety and divorce: “vacations are cancelled; Saturday’s disappear as the migraining spouse stays in bed and the non-migraining spouse drifts absently around the house, too solicitous to leave, too bored to stay and not resent it.” Though most of the book is a chronicle of his own struggles with the illness, Levy produces a remarkable list of famous victims—including Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud and Elvis Presley—quoting liberally from their accounts. The author produces a dynamic portrayal of the migraineurs’ world, an ominous alternative universe where the subtlest sight, sound, smell or innocent event can trigger an attack. Because Levy is a writing professor, readers will encounter a heavy dose of metaphor and long, poetic, stream-of-consciousness passages describing the nightmarish misery of an endless headache. Sufferers will empathize; most general readers will sympathize.

An impressive meditation on a devastating affliction.

Pub Date: May 19, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4165-7250-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)