by Jill Edelman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2013
A must-read for parents of special needs children nearing adulthood.
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In a year’s worth of blog posts, a mother goes through the complex process of helping her special needs daughter make the transition from childhood to independent adulthood.
In the introduction to her debut work, Edelman quotes a journalist friend: “This is a story that nobody is telling.” From bookstore to blogosphere, there are many accounts of raising special needs children but fewer about caring for a developmentally disabled adult child. Edelman explains that her topic is “the parents’ quest to bring their child to the threshold of adulthood, safely and successfully” and to “provide something of a map for others to use.” As Edelman describes with impressive specificity, there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved—in her case, most of it centered on her daughter’s return home from boarding school and turning 21. At that age, she “ages out” of the Connecticut public school system and other state resources and segues into a whole new frontier of need-based services, of which Medicaid is probably the least complicated. There’s a mass of jargon and acronyms and a crazy quilt of service agencies, all of which Edelman, a licensed social worker, explains fluently. She writes with equal assurance when describing her conflicting emotions: gratitude and frustration with the system and hesitation about when to help her daughter and when to stand back. She writes of her unmistakably heartfelt love for her child and honestly portrays the difficulties of dealing with her disability. The transition of this material from blog to book, however, is somewhat less well-handled. The text seems to have been transferred verbatim, including some dead and absent links, and its practice of beginning almost every paragraph with an italicized subheading is hardly noticeable in a blog but somewhat tedious in a nearly 500-page book. However, the book sensitively does what it sets out to do, documenting a complicated and too-little-discussed struggle in order to help others dealing with similar challenges. This account provides both the practical advice of an insider and the compassion and wisdom of a loving parent.
A must-read for parents of special needs children nearing adulthood.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 519
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ric Edelman & Jill Edelman ; illustrated by Dave Zaboski
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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