An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.
A father’s candid, heart-wrenching account of raising, loving and trying to connect with and gain insight into his severely disabled son.
A journalist for The Globe and Mail, Brown wrote a series of pieces about his son Walker for the newspaper in 2007. The book, a multiple-award winner in Canada when it was first published in 2009, is largely based on those pieces, which in turn had their beginnings in a journal the author had kept. Brown’s son Walker was born with cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder affecting only a few hundred children around the world. The author writes of the struggle to raise a self-destructive child who could not speak and suffered numerous physical deformities and medical problems, recounting in sometimes harsh detail the onerous daily routine of caring for the boy and the strains this put on his marriage. However, this is much more than a moving journal of life with a disabled child; it is about Brown’s quest to understand his son and his son’s condition. He seeks out and profiles other families with CFC children, interviews a genetic researcher who found mutations in three genes related to the disorder, looks for clues to CFC through an MRI of Walker’s brain and travels to France to visit L’Arche, a faith-based organization that operates communities for the developmentally disabled. Brown’s story of the frustrations of trying to do the best for his child and find a safe place for him in a world uncomfortable with people with disabilities reveals the failures of society to establish a coherent system to help the families of disabled children. After years of at-home care, the author found a satisfactory group home for Walker, now 13, where he appears to be thriving.
An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-67183-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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