A hilarious remembrance of a life-changing malady.
A stroke survivor recounts his struggles in and out of the hospital in this debut book.
In 2006, Ellis was enjoying a pimento cheese sandwich, trying to figure out with his wife, Cristie, what DVD to watch that evening. Suddenly, his speech became muddled and his face contorted, and Cristie realized he was in the throes of a stroke. The author was rushed to the nearest hospital, where he spent the next four days unconscious, his wife standing a nervous vigil by his side. Ellis—a professional copywriter—recounts the months that followed in the hospital, a messy mixture of convalescence, rehabilitation, and imprisonment. Some of the struggle is physical: the rigors of occupational therapy, the relearning of basic mechanical functions including speech, an accommodation of some permanent disability. Much of it, though, is psychological: making peace with a loss of privacy and the challenge to modesty that come with hospital life, the reliance upon a daily diet of pharmaceuticals, the fear of a second stroke. Ellis liberally dispenses advice to the reader about how to cope with the aftermath of a stroke, how to avoid one in the first place, and how to manage daily life trapped in a medical institution, almost always delivered whimsically: “It wasn’t until three weeks prior to being released that I discovered the secret of surviving in a hospital room for months. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Travel Channel!” He also wryly includes a recipe for Southern-style pimento cheese. The author, who recalls his trials with humor and verve, furnishes guidance on how to be an effective medical consumer, navigating the sometimes coldly indifferent bureaucracy of the medical industry. Ellis eventually returned to work as a freelancer, and even stars in a public service announcement on stroke symptom awareness. The book doubles as a memoir and a cautionary tale—a kind of instructional manual constructed out of personal experience. Ellis’ writing beautifully softens the sometimes frightening subject matter with the emolument of comedy, relating real wisdom with wit. This is an unusually cheery work written about a medical calamity, and every page radiates gratitude for the life the author rebuilt.
A hilarious remembrance of a life-changing malady.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0148-2
Page Count: 140
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
