Insider’s view of brain damage clarifies the experience with honesty and humor.
Straightforward account of how the author of the Benny Cooperman mystery series coped with a life-altering stroke.
Engel discovered one morning in 2001 that his daily newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, appeared to have been written in Cyrillic or Korean. Recovering from his stroke at Mount Sinai Hospital, he was diagnosed with alexia sine agraphia, which meant that though he could still write, he could not read what he had written. This was a severe blow: Engel was, he writes, “a one-trick pony, and reading was my trick.” A brief account of his childhood and early years illustrates his addiction to reading and his introduction to writing. The memoir focuses, however, on his post-stroke life. For three months in a rehab center he worked with a specialist who helped him master the exhausting process of learning to decipher words letter by letter. Strategies that helped included writing letters in the air with his finger or tracing them on the roof of his mouth with his tongue. He began a “memory book” to help keep track of details that his scrambled brain could no longer retain; pages from this and from a journal he also kept are reproduced here. On his return home, Engel got reacquainted with his computer—the various screens looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t read the instructions—and began a new Cooperman mystery (Memory Book, 2006). He drew on his rehab experience to depict his private eye waking up in a hospital with alexia sine agraphia; friends helped by reading his written words back to him aloud. When the novel was finished, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote an appreciative afterword for it, as he has for the present work.
Insider’s view of brain damage clarifies the experience with honesty and humor.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-38209-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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