A unique memoir that focuses more on recovery than tragedy.
Smith’s debut memoir recounts her rise in the equestrian world and the accident that changed her life.
This book alternates between present-day reflections (“Now”) and memories that go back to the author’s childhood. Smith, who was born in the mid-1960s and raised in the rural town of Burritts Rapids, south of Ottawa, started riding horses at an early age. As she matured, she shaped her life around riding competitions, placing highly in events across Canada. Even after she entered the working world as a computer programmer, she continued to compete, splitting her time between Canada and the warmer climes of North Carolina. Eventually, Smith won a spot on Canada’s equestrian team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. After a disappointing performance there, she continued to ride competitively until a fateful day the following year. In the middle of an event, her horse tumbled, throwing her headfirst to the ground. After months of rehabilitation, during which Smith relearned how to walk and speak, her memory reawakened. She became focused on getting back into riding, despite warnings from doctors and family, but soon realized that she could no longer do so at her previous level. She then found a new focus: pursuing a doctorate in counseling and specializing in research on the aftereffects of brain injury. She then dealt with the onset of a chronic neurological illness that eventually necessitated the use of a wheelchair. Over the course of this memoir, the writing shifts from a reserved recounting of Smith’s past into more artistic reflections of her post-injury life. Between these sections, Smith allows her parents, Brad and Renée Smith, to tell the story of her treatment; the author, at the time, suffered from post-traumatic amnesia and couldn’t form new memories. It’s an engaging technique that mirrors Smith’s own change in thinking following her accident. Occasionally, though, the prose becomes somewhat repetitive, restating the same conclusions in successive paragraphs; the final section also includes some aimless anecdotes. For the most part, however, Smith’s text is educational and compelling.
A unique memoir that focuses more on recovery than tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2642-3
Page Count: 260
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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