A remembrance that effectively captures the author’s emotional pain and her attempts to come to terms with it.
The daughter of legendary sportscaster George Michael recalls their fractious relationship.
On author Cindi Michael’s 16th birthday, her father, then the host of the popular sports highlights TV show The George Michael Sports Machine, wrote her: “No father in this world has ever had a better daughter bring him more pride than you bring me.” Yet by her first year in college, she says, he’d effectively disowned her, and, a few years before his death in 2009, he told her not to contact him “EVER,” accusing her of causing “more pain and heartache than I could tolerate.” As one of three children, she basked in her father’s love as a young girl, but that love, she writes, “had to be earned” due to her father’s perfectionist expectations. The difficulties accelerated, she says, after her parents separated in 1973, when she was 8; she recalls lamenting that she “hadn’t said enough bad things about my mother” during a custody hearing. When she later suggested family therapy, she says that her father responded, “Ain’t no way in hell I’m doing that.” The disowning appears to have been triggered, in part, by the author’s affair at 18 with the vice principal of her high school, an experience she says she might have avoided “If only I hadn’t been so starved for love.” In this memoir, Michael meticulously traces the agonizing course of a fractious relationship that still haunts her. There is, of course, no shortage of memoirs about benighted families, but the author, who says that she’s also estranged from her sister, is unflinching in her self-analysis in this remembrance: “Twenty years later, I am still trying to figure out if the strength of my love for them is a blessing or a curse,” she writes. Now a mother of two herself, she provides the insight that “the past—a difficult one anyway—can only be laid to rest when we have examined and understood it.” Burying the past, she says, “was my father’s greatest downfall.”
A remembrance that effectively captures the author’s emotional pain and her attempts to come to terms with it.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-107-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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