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NOW YOU SEE THE SKY

A tender, love-filled story of how one woman dealt with the loss of a young child.

A mother’s tale of love and loss.

In 1989, when she was 23, Murray left her Maine home and traveled to Thailand to work at a refugee camp, and she quickly fell in love with the people, culture, and natural surroundings. She eventually married a Thai man, Dtaw, and had three sons with him. As she chronicles, their family life was simple and peaceful—until illness struck her middle son, Chan, when he was 5. He was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, and the family moved to Seattle (“a halfway spot between Dtaw’s home in Thailand and mine in Maine”) for months of treatment before returning to Thailand. With vivid, immediate prose, the author successfully conveys the dismay, pain, sorrow, love, and joy the family experienced during Chan’s battle with his disease. Murray intertwines lush descriptions of the Thai landscape and culture with that of her more frenetic Western background as well as her views on medicine, which show the ambiguity she felt as she tried to do what was best for Chan. As the author came to the horrible realization that there was no chance of Chan recovering, she slowly eased into the mindset of making each moment with him count. Murray’s lucid meditations and living-in-the-moment attitude—e.g., providing simple pleasures like a favorite food to a sick child—serve as useful reminders to all of us that life is precious and fleeting and must be enjoyed to the fullest. It’s a simple message but an important one. As much a eulogy to Chan as a testament to the joy of life, the book is a heartwarming tale of dealing with life-altering loss. “I get mired in my own travails less now than I did before,” writes Murray in closing. “I don’t squint down into the blackness of my own mind so much anymore. Now I try to look up. I try to see the sky.”

A tender, love-filled story of how one woman dealt with the loss of a young child.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-61775-666-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Gracie Belle/Akashic

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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