by Cheryl Miguel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2015
An intense, compelling account relates the romantic turmoil and physical pain experienced by a career woman diagnosed with...
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An accountant and mother of two daughters writes candidly about her struggles with love, life, and suffering.
This debut memoir opens with a traumatic scene. While preparing dinner for herself one night, the author, a longtime lupus sufferer, tripped on her dog’s toy rope and knocked herself unconscious. Too weakened from her disease to stand up, she awakened and crawled toward a telephone to call for help, hoping that one of her daughters would come home soon and find her. Eventually, she fell into a kind of existential limbo, forced to consider why she was alone and urine-soaked on the floor. She lamented her failing relationship with Dave, a fellow accountant who came into constant conflict with her teenage daughters. And although she loved her daughters and wanted to preserve their independence as much as possible, she also resented them for not being more of a help in trying times. In subsequent chapters, Miguel revisits the emotional difficulty of watching her father gradually waste away from lupus, her problematic romance with Dave, her failed first marriage, and her increasingly contentious relationships with her daughters and extended family. Ultimately, the work concerns how suffering is as much a physical experience as an emotional one. The trials that Miguel and her circle faced reveal their flawed humanity. With a deft sense of pacing, the author vividly portrays each person in the narrative (“He was tan, twenty pounds lighter, and had an inner glow”). As a character, Miguel is fully formed: her weaknesses are as sharply drawn as her strengths (“The optimistic attitude I usually possessed had quickly and unknowingly been replaced with a victim mentality”). While the memoir becomes repetitious in its descriptions of Miguel’s numerous physical difficulties, the tight, clear prose remains compelling (“Since the cruise, it felt as though I were being placed back into a cell to finish out a life sentence”). Her surprising visit to a doctor later in the book (her lupus, it seems, may have been misdiagnosed) acts as a much-needed twist: what is the point of Miguel’s suffering? More important, how has her pain informed her relationships, and how will she change her behavior and attitude going forward?
An intense, compelling account relates the romantic turmoil and physical pain experienced by a career woman diagnosed with lupus.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3857-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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