In this memoir, a blind, retired judge revisits his battle with chronic illness and the loss of his sight.
Brown opens his second memoir (Blind Justice, 2009) with the chilling line, “Going blind is like dying except you are still alive.” He then recounts his battle with Behcet’s Syndrome and becoming blind, spanning from his undergraduate days in the Triangle area of North Carolina, to his transition to retirement from the law profession where he was a district court judge, imparting advice from his life experiences along the way. After battling to stave off his impending blindness for more than a decade, Brown must physically and mentally adjust to life as a disabled person and deal with other life changes, or “train wrecks” as he calls them. He delivers some practical advice about handling loss and making good decisions about health care, but his focus could be better controlled and his audience narrowed down in order to avoid alienating some readers. While the book is filled with clichéd phrases, several stand-out lines, such as the opening one, bring emotion to Brown’s ordeal. The chapters alternate between encyclopedia-like recall of people and places associated with his life in Durham and advice for others facing a chronic disease. Photographs interspersed in the text and quotes beginning each chapter feel elementary, but Brown showcases his writing chops in the standout chapter “The Sightless End Game.” In it, he undergoes a series of cataract surgeries with the hope of being able to continue to see the face of his firstborn daughter and eventually memorize the face of his second daughter before he loses his sight completely, and this makes for heartwarming, emotionally charged scenes. The book concludes first with a chapter on Brown’s ideas for decreasing the national debt and then a final chapter on hope and love. While the book’s scope could have benefited from a tighter focus, the memoir has moments where there is much to learn from Brown’s wisdom. An ambitious memoir with a unique viewpoint regarding disabilities and life’s “train wrecks.”
Pub Date: March 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460937617
Page Count: 251
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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