A tender tribute to a too-short life.
Ingerson’s poignant debut memoir recounts the challenges and blessings of raising a terminally ill child.
Ingerson was in Okinawa with the Air Force when his fourth child, Caleb, was born. It was immediately clear the child had life-threatening defects, including fistulas and a malformed heart. Indeed, doctors expected the baby to die imminently. Over his three-and-a-half-year life span, Caleb had 10 operations, including open-heart surgery. The family was in constant flux, relocating to be close to the best hospitals. When it looked like things could not get worse, they did in a major way: Caleb contracted HIV from a tainted blood transfusion. Despite the wrenching sadness of his subject matter, Ingerson is a natural storyteller and often emphasizes the humorous side. For instance, driven by an urge to inspect his son’s backside, he was the first to notice anything wrong with Caleb: “Say, Doctor, this is curious; the garage door is closed,” he remarked; that imperforate anus was the first sign of heart problems. Later, after the HIV infection, which placed a stigma on Caleb even within their church, Ingerson appreciated the irony of the unlikely tragedy: “Caleb won the lottery!” For the Ingersons, faith in God was paramount. This is a sensitive chronicle of a journey through pain and doubt, often relying on metaphors of life-giving waves and a solid rock. However, Ingerson fully acknowledges the practical and emotional tolls. Understanding medical jargon and being his son’s advocate were draining, and Caleb’s treatment cost over $2 million. “We had no example to encourage us to have realistic expectations,” he says. “I’d go into my study and would find myself alternating between fierce anger and longing for relief from my lonely agony as well as from my son’s many sufferings.” Pondering why God allowed this suffering, Ingerson toes the interventionist line: “He could have acted to avert it—yet He did not.” Those who beg to differ theologically can still enjoy this thorough, gripping medical memoir, its narrative peppered with journal entries and email updates to friends. Photos of Caleb would be welcome.
A tender tribute to a too-short life.Pub Date: May 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1939570147
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Word & Spirit Resources, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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