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
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
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
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