A frank, compassionate, and highly detailed account of the roller-coaster ride of caring for a disabled, autistic child.
Factor (Love Maps, 2015, etc.) chronicles life with her nonverbal son Felix, who is autistic and physically disabled.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, the author’s boyfriend, Jason, was near the buildings. While she waited for news from him, she had the agonizing fear that they might never have a child together, which led them to getting married and pregnant a year later. During her pregnancy, Factor contracted chicken pox, which, though she didn’t realize it at the time, hurt her growing fetus. In this honest memoir that vibrates with unconditional love, the author details what life is like with Felix and her other two children. It took many months, numerous visits to doctors and specialists, and endless tests before she found out just how handicapped Felix would be due to his lack of white matter in his brain. Factor adeptly chronicles each step of the process, each moment of triumph when Felix reached a new goal, and the times when she and her husband felt dismay and even shame when he failed to advance like the other toddlers around him. Throughout, readers gain a sense of the complexity of Felix, whether he’s happy, responding to music therapy, or engaged in some awful fit that forces him to scream and tear at his own body. Factor also discusses her other two children, who were born without such issues, her battles with the health care and educational systems, and her subsequent founding of the nonprofit community center Extreme Kids & Crew. The author’s story demonstrates the need for more quality help for parents of children with disabilities, who will find solace in knowing that others have struggled and found joy in this type of parenting.
A frank, compassionate, and highly detailed account of the roller-coaster ride of caring for a disabled, autistic child.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941529-72-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Parallax Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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