A highly readable story of illness, treatment, and its impact on a family.
A mother’s memoir of her son’s illness and early death.
In this debut memoir, Frare recounts the story of her son Christopher, who survived a heart transplant at the age of 15 and died of cancer at the age of 22. Portions of the narrative are in Christopher’s words, drawn from essays and recordings he made over the course of his illness, and in the introduction, Frare explains her decision to list him as a co-author. As a cardiology-focused nurse, Frare found herself in a difficult position when her son was diagnosed with heart failure. She was aware of the dangers but too involved for a nurse’s traditional detachment: “The physicians expected me to be so clinical, calm, and cool. Do CPR on my own son? Were they kidding me?” Frare often writes with emotion, but an occasional stark sentence also works well, as when she offers a taste of her son’s postoperative medication regimen: “Twenty-one horse pills that smelled like skunk were the main ones, and the rest of the pills counteracted their bad side effects.” Christopher’s health continued to be uneven as he finished high school and started college, though his drug and alcohol use often tested the limits of his family’s sympathy. He got himself under control but soon after was diagnosed with cancer, which was ultimately fatal. Frare heartbreakingly ties Christopher’s story into her own process of grief, recovery, and redemption. Excerpts from Christopher’s journal present the authentic voice of a teenage boy aware that he was fighting the odds and also resentful about the end of his normal childhood: “I went to the hospital, and six weeks later I got the most worthless piece of shit contraption—a pacemaker. It totally ended my football career.” “My parents dread these periods” of his feeling unusually good and energetic, he later wrote, “not because I am feeling better but because this reinforces my existing teenage invincibility, and I listen to nothing my parents tell me.”
A highly readable story of illness, treatment, and its impact on a family.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1502997326
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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