An affecting account remarkable both in its content and execution.
A debut memoir recounts the difficulties of paralysis and grief.
Written using software that tracks the movement of Sutherland’s eyes—essentially the only part of his body he can still control—this book tells the story of the massive, unanticipated, and seemingly intolerable changes that the author’s life underwent beginning in the fall of 2007. It was then that Sutherland, a 41-year-old obstetrician with a wife and three sons, decided to see a specialist about his left arm. The loss of strength and muscle twitching had led him to suspect it was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis but hearing it confirmed by a neurologist made it terrifyingly real. He suddenly had an 80% probability of dying within the next five years, and even if he lived, he would lose the ability to move and speak. With time to prepare for the inevitable, he spent the next two years taking trips with his family and retiring from his medical practice, making beautiful memories that were nevertheless dampened by the looming disease. Then came the loss of more and more abilities until Sutherland could no longer walk, eat, or even breathe on his own. Even so, he elected to continue living: to learn to accommodate the effects of the disease and not let them rob him of a fruitful existence on Earth. “This book deals with all kinds of change but it focuses on that which we would prefer” to avoid: “change that occurs against our will,” writes Sutherland in his preface. “No one wants these changes and still they come. When a negative change occurs, we have to choose how we will face it.” Then, in the spring of 2016, a second unimaginable tragedy struck the author’s family: His oldest son and his girlfriend drowned while kayaking in the river behind the Sutherland home. The loss took the author—who had already given up so much—to the very edge of his endurance. Sutherland’s prose is measured and thoughtful, and his accounts of fleeting moments are made all the more heartbreaking by his understated appreciation of them: “I remember the last time I cradled a newborn baby, and my last week in the hospital, strolling through the medical unit with a walker to keep my balance—recognizing the irony that my life expectancy was now shorter than that of most of the patients in my charge.” The author is such a sympathetic narrator, and his story is so mortifyingly tragic that readers will undoubtedly be persuaded by the wisdom he draws from his experiences. The work is by no means a fun read, but there is a serenity to his grief—a literal one—that is unexpectedly reassuring. He comes off not as a prisoner of his own body but rather as a monk in a cell who has been granted a rare opportunity to observe a world that few readers have the patience to see. With immense humility, he questions many of the things that people assume are necessary aspects of the human experience, digging toward a deeper, kinder understanding of life.
An affecting account remarkable both in its content and execution.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9994395-6-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Sutherland House
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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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