A heartbreaking, inspirational story of perseverance through unbearable circumstances.
Barker’s debut memoir recounts a five-year maelstrom of tragic events that she and her husband endured in their attempts to start a family.
In 1986, after an uncomplicated pregnancy, Barker and her husband were stunned to learn that their newborn had a serious heart condition requiring immediate surgery. Not only that—their tiny daughter, Lauren, also had Down syndrome. Both issues came as a complete shock to the couple, as neither had a family history of genetic problems. Yet this was only the beginning of what Barker aptly describes as a “vicious cycle of misfortune.” Lauren was admitted to a subpar hospital, Barker says, because of their restrictive HMO, and she tells of frequently enduring callous, even negligent care from staff members. There were angels along the way, however—people who provided understanding and key assistance at just the right times. Despite this, the family’s apparent bad luck continued. After surgery for an ectopic pregnancy, Barker discovered that she had contracted hepatitis B, most likely during the procedure, she says. Later, she delivered a healthy baby boy, but the joyous occasion was clouded by Lauren’s upcoming heart operation, which was complicated by infection (also likely the hospital’s fault, the author says) that led to the child’s tragic death. Fate was not yet finished, however: after Barker learned that she was again expecting, a cancerous lump was discovered in her breast. The first doctor instructed her to terminate the pregnancy; appalled, she pursued a second opinion and eventually delivered another strong baby boy. The experiences in this book seem almost too harrowing to be true, yet Barker’s intelligent, clear prose will keep readers grounded. The author writes of events that took place over several decades, which seems to have provided her with the necessary perspective to make sense of a tumultuous time. Readers who might scoff at the author’s consultation of an astrologer will likely change their tunes after she tells of how the traditional medical community repeatedly failed her. When she poignantly declares that “Never again will we take any medical professional’s advice unquestioningly,” it’s food for thought for every reader.
A heartbreaking, inspirational story of perseverance through unbearable circumstances.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-810-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
