An uneven but often engaging memoir that provides a much-needed window into how serious genetic conditions affect families.
In her debut, Rough explores her family's history with a rare genetic condition and how it has affected her life.
The symptoms of hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED) include the inability to sweat or produce tears, and other physical traits such as sparse hair, few and strangely shaped teeth and dry, nearly hairless skin. In the X-linked form of the condition, the gene is carried by females and manifests in males. The author's grandfather and brother suffered from the condition. Rough's mother is a carrier, and, as she discovered, so is Rough herself. A large part of this highly personal memoir deals with the author's quest to find out more about her HED-affected grandfather, Earl. He underwent a lifetime of breathing problems and constant infections, aggravated by mucous-membrane problems, and likely a suppressed immune system. He also developed a severe drug addiction brought on by the pain of his illnesses. At one point, he was given shock treatments in a psychiatric hospital; later, his wife divorced him. He eventually died at age 49, broke and alone. The author ably shows how HED devastated Earl's and his family's lives, but the story's effectiveness is compromised by some of Rough's stylistic choices—in particular, the narration of much of the story from Earl's first-person point of view. The author also writes that she re-created conversations and details using “disciplined imagination,” an odd designation. Nonetheless, Rough a fine writer with a talent for portraying subtle family dynamics. When she writes as herself, she is often quite moving—particularly when she deals with the possibility of passing HED to her unborn child and her pain as she receives the fateful genetic-test results.
An uneven but often engaging memoir that provides a much-needed window into how serious genetic conditions affect families.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-578-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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