Both serious and fun; a gripping, moving account.
One woman’s journey through illness and alternative medicine.
In 1995, author Asselin began experiencing strange bouts of muscle weakness and was quickly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Finding conventional Western medicine harsh and uncaring, Asselin turned to alternative methods, primarily in the form of bodywork and chiropractic therapy from two healers. They become her guides on a journey of self-discovery and healing that, contrary to similar books, doesn’t end in unequivocal success or monolithic pronouncements about medicine, the body or the nature of reality. Though she believes “MS is a pretty harsh lesson but it was probably the best lesson for me,” Asselin never strays into sappy pronouncements or heavy-handed spirituality. Her breezy, funny writing, with its healthy mix of skepticism and openness, makes for brisk reading. The author experiences ups and downs with all of her treatments, as well as in her relationships with her parents, well-meaning friends and assistants, all of whom have varying responses to her changing body and abilities. A large part of the book explores how her inner demons—self-doubt, guilt and fear, among others—affected her health, with quotes and theories from various writers and thinkers, including Ram Dass, Richard Bach and Don Miguel Ruiz. Though this section meanders and is slightly less personable than others, it remains interesting and thought-provoking, peppered with Asselin’s enthusiastic and wry voice. A harrowing bus accident breaks up this section, and the author’s surprising resiliency would seem to indicate that alternative therapies work, but she never flat-out attributes her well-being to any one modality, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. Those curious about alternative medicine will find this book refreshing, engaging and inspiring.
Both serious and fun; a gripping, moving account.Pub Date: June 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1460213094
Page Count: 264
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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