A medical account that successfully examines the deeper fears readers have about death and dissatisfaction.
A woman recounts coming to terms with a life-threatening heart illness in this inspirational memoir.
A retired emergency room and ICU nurse, Speake (Slow Hope, 2005) did not accept the news that she had idiopathic cardiomyopathy with as much grace as one might expect. “My cardiac diagnosis tilted my whole world off its axis,” she recalls. “It felt like I’d awakened one morning to discover I’d been moved to a new neighborhood in a new city, and I hated it. In fact, it wasn’t long before I developed a whole new list of hates.” Her medication caused nausea and insomnia, and the 10,000 steps she was expected to walk every day seemed a Herculean feat even with the help of George (or “G,” as she calls him), her husband of 25 years. The author was interested in the reasons for her heart disease, specifically whether it had to do with the physical and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her alcoholic parents. But, as Speake learned, definitive answers weren’t always available, and with a potentially fatal condition, she needed to figure out a way to be at peace with her past, her present, and whatever the future might hold. This memoir chronicles the author’s journey confronting her own mortality, which included moving beyond the treatments and statistics of Western medicine and into explorations of reiki, mindfulness, and a new sort of relationship with God. Speake’s sharp prose captures the tension she felt in her search for answers: “Had the life I’d led contributed to my heart disease diagnosis? Had there been too many divorces? Too many men? Had my parents been too abusive? For most of my adult life, I’d been a single parent. Had all the years of my hard work in the end been too hard and the years too many?” The book is less about the gravity of the author’s illness than her own inability to not panic over its potential to be serious. In this way, her situation is surprisingly relatable—everyone is dying, fast or slow—and the need to find a way to be OK with that is as urgent for her as it is for readers.
A medical account that successfully examines the deeper fears readers have about death and dissatisfaction.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-437-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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