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TAKE IT LYING DOWN

FINDING MY FEET AFTER A SPINAL CORD INJURY

A stunning account.

“Being paralyzed was a fact I couldn’t deny but didn’t let my mind admit.” A powerful exploration of navigating physical disability.

In this lyrical account, Linnell (Emeritus, Theatre and Dance/Univ. of New Mexico; Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama, 2011) examines the seemingly mundane accident that rendered him a quadriplegic at age 70—and the aftermath of coping and rehabilitation. The author opens with a family vacation in remote Baja, Mexico, in 2012, when he was in his final year as a professor. Stepping off a porch at their rental house, he fell down and destroyed his body. Drama builds early as the family tries to locate an ambulance, arranges an airlift to Albuquerque, and then maneuvers him to a spinal cord rehabilitation center in Denver. The positioning of the broken bones meant that he would likely remain a quadriplegic. However, Linnell also learned that he had an approximate two-year window during which he might regain some of his mobility. Any reader who has experienced protracted therapy for a paralyzing injury, or has watched somebody else experience such an ordeal, will recognize the universality of Linnell’s saga even if the particulars differ. Understandably alternating among determination, hopelessness, optimism, and depression, the author rejects the label of courageous. The real heroes, he writes, are his wife and the doctors and therapists who assisted him. Every chapter is filled with memorable analogies and metaphors, making Linnell’s journey to partial recovery a pleasurable intellectual experience for readers despite the horrors, fears, and winding mental path through rehab. “I fear I will be cut loose,” he writes. “This fear grows from a train of thought that says accident is punishment. I will be discarded; every face will greet me with a dismissive pity.” Because the author was able to visit with other patients in the rehab division, readers will also learn about the variations in spinal cord trauma. Following his departure from the hospital, the narrative focus shifts toward his wife, who battled the daily challenges of helping him at home.

A stunning account.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-58988-135-8

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Paul Dry Books

Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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