An eye-opening journey.
The struggle for a normal life through the eyes of a sufferer of bipolar disorder.
Unless one’s life has been touched by bipolar disorder, it’s hard to imagine the effects of the manic-depressive illness. But in this memoir, Walton takes readers deep inside the disease. From the opening page, she captures the internal debate raging during an episode: Is this real? Can anyone be trusted? Psychotic episodes followed by depression is her “usual” pattern, a pattern that consumes chunks of her life each time. In an almost detached and analytical voice, Walton deftly describes the thoughts and feelings during what she calls the “insane” time, the motionlessness of the resulting depression and the efforts to have a normal life—complete with a job, marriage, family and women’s groups—in between. Beginning with her first episode, the memoir then explores the author’s backstory, then ahead to treatment, then back into the past and forward again; much along the lines of a self-discovery process. Despite the shifting chronology, the work never loses its insight into bipolar disorder or the connection between author and reader, as she leads the exploration through the ins and outs of her particular world. At first resistant to medication, Walton ultimately builds a team to help her, including a cocktail of medicines to right her damaging chemical imbalances and manage her symptoms, and the unending support of her husband, daughter, therapist, family and friends. Forever lurking, underlining every aspect of her existence, though, is the question of: “How much longer until the next breakdown?” Until it happens, Walton is living her life and meeting it head on, keenly aware of just how precious every day really is.
An eye-opening journey.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2010
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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