A heartening and well-told family story.
A father pays tribute to his son, who inspired many with his optimism during 39 years of living with a severe disability.
Debut author and freelance agricultural writer Boone’s middle son, Peter (1975-2014), had spina bifida. He was born with a high, large, open wound on his back and was given a poor prognosis. Luckily, medical advances made Peter part of the first generation of spina bifida patients to reach adulthood. But his was no easy ride: he was soon wheelchair-bound and over the years endured 80-plus surgeries and multiple hospitalizations. A particularly disastrous 1987 operation left Peter reliant on oxygen and a ventilator and unable to eat or speak normally; for nearly nine years, he communicated chiefly by mouthing words. It’s impressive how conventional a life Peter led despite intense physical trials: from elementary school onward, he attended regular classes; he learned to drive a customized van and attended his prom; and after getting an associate’s degree, he worked as a tutor at his old high school. Boone skillfully cuts between Peter’s major achievements and the challenges of daily life with a disabled family member; in particular, he is careful not to neglect struggles his wife and other sons faced. While telling Peter’s story as a straightforward yet absorbing chronological narrative, the author occasionally pauses to thank those who supported his family: Peter’s doctors, their Quaker congregation, and Joni and Friends (a charity founded by quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada), whose camps Peter attended and then volunteered in. Peter’s obsessive love of sports, especially football and the Purdue teams, is a strong theme running throughout the moving book—“although he couldn’t be an athlete in body, he was a great one in spirit,” Boone writes. Crucially, Peter and his family never stopped seeing the lighter side of things, as in a vivid scene in which flooding forced them to deliver Peter home by tractor. It’s no wonder that his high school instituted the “Peter Boone Mental Attitude Award” in his honor or that 400 attended his memorial service when he succumbed to a coronary thrombosis.
A heartening and well-told family story.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7878-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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