A worthy and comforting book about one woman’s grief.
Southern California–based nurse and debut author Anderson shares the story of the loss of her 19-year-old son, and her journey through the next two years.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 16, 2016, the author received the kind of phone call that all parents dread. The eldest of her four children, Jeramie, nicknamed “Jem,” had been in a serious car accident. Hours later, she finally confirmed that he did not survive. “The loss of a child breaks you,” she writes in the preface to this slim, touching volume. Overwhelmed by grief, she faced a choice: “Do I…live my life trying in vain to be whole again….Or do I accept that this is me now? Do I allow and accept myself to be broken?” She says that writing letters to Jem after his death—which are included in this book—was her way of keeping him near. She originally wrote these missives on paper and an online journal, and they allowed her to give voice to her profound grief. She later started a Twitter account to read Jem’s old Twitter posts and his friends’ new ones. She also had his first tattoo replicated on her own ankle: “the lotus flower for inner strength and peace; Om for what was, what is, and what will be; and flames for the rage inside.” Overall, her memoir offers a tender account of her own acceptance of pain as part of her new reality. Some of the most poignant musings in the book deal with how she found it difficult to answer simple questions in social situations, such as “How many children do you have?” She felt that saying “three” somehow negated Jem’s existence, she says, so she finally decided to say, “I had four children. But one is no longer with us.” She effectively concludes, “Just put it out there. The truth. Even if it makes the person who asked the question uncomfortable.” Over the course of this reassuring remembrance, she comes to the realization that although there will always be tears in her future, there will also be times for laughter and joy.
A worthy and comforting book about one woman’s grief.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7278-3
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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