Emotionally taxing yet powerfully uplifting.
In this debut memoir, a tenacious young woman battles a rare, life-threatening disease that leaves her unable to eat.
Aboulafia, now a law student, had only one semester of her undergraduate studies left in December 2015. She awoke one morning with a strong sense that the carefree joy of her life was about to abruptly end. Diagnosed with an immune deficiency at birth, the author was all too familiar with illnesses from whooping cough to scarlet fever. But the symptoms that she now began to experience were new and unnerving. Specifically, she began to develop trouble eating. At first, this manifested itself as feeling full for many hours after meals, but then she started to become nauseated when faced with certain foods. As the symptoms intensified, her weight dropped worryingly, so she visited her gastroenterologist, who dismissed her symptoms as psychosomatic and suggested that she was anorexic. It was only when her condition became life-threatening, with her weight dropping to around 70 pounds, that doctors recognized her as having an extremely rare disorder called superior mesenteric artery syndrome. Two days before her 22nd birthday, she was even told by a doctor that she could possibly die in six weeks. What follows is an alarmingly honest story of the author’s battle against chronic illness. It’s unsurprising that Aboulafia has a background in law, as she’s unafraid to present cold, clear facts: “I was so thin because I had been starving, because I was literally dying, and I didn’t know how long I had left if the surgery didn’t work.” This matter-of-fact approach makes for an emotional narrative, as the author also relates the pivotal roles that her girlfriend, family, and religion played in her recovery: “I talked to God until the sun came up, filling up my hospital room and showing me again, firsthand, that I was alive.” From an author who deems herself to be a “lover, not a fighter,” this is a courageous and emotionally sensitive recollection of a terrifying battle.
Emotionally taxing yet powerfully uplifting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 287
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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