Deeply moving, extraordinarily thought-provoking and entirely humane.
A meaningful portrayal of how tragedy affected and transformed one family and especially one religious leader.
Sherman, a rabbi in upstate New York, points to a single day in March 1986 as the point at which his family’s life was forever altered. His son, Eyal, was found to have a lesion in the brainstem. Given no hope for recovery without aggressive treatment, doctors attempted an ambitious surgery, which kept Eyal alive but left him a quadriplegic. It was the beginning of three decades of traumatic health issues, lengthy hospital stays, and daily, mundane care needs stretching around the clock. Sherman does not set out merely to tell his son’s story, or even that of him and his family. Instead, he emphasizes how this experience has transformed them, how it has shaped him as a man of faith and how it has thoroughly changed how he understands other people. Though Sherman describes many situations filled with heartbreaking pain, fear and even monotony, his true focus is on community. He examines the relationships within his family and how his son’s very life is a precious gift. He also explores his congregation, looking at how they have helped each other (and at times stumbled) and how his ministry to others has grown deeper through difficult experiences. Lastly, Sherman focuses on the larger community—e.g., total strangers who treated them with extraordinary kindness or those of other religions and walks of life with whom he has been able to bond. Throughout, Sherman ties his narrative to his faith, exploring how everything he has experienced, from anger to joy, is mirrored in Scripture. “When I heard Eyal’s terrible prognosis, my life was shattered,” he writes. “But eventually, as Moses did, I got up and climbed the mountain again.”
Deeply moving, extraordinarily thought-provoking and entirely humane.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5616-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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