Authentic and genuinely inspirational.
In this deeply felt memoir that’s more philosophical than medical, a personal injury lawyer’s resilience, natural tenacity, and support from a strong family and a few close friends spur his seemingly miraculous recovery from a traumatic brain injury that should have destroyed him.
Debut author Huerta compellingly and without self-pity recounts his long bounce back from a horrific 1998 skiing accident in Colorado in which he collided with a tree and fractured his skull in 23 places. Huerta, of Corpus Christi, Texas, then 31 years old and by his own account “living the fancy life at the end of the last millennium,” lay near death and in a coma for 12 days at a Denver hospital, his head grotesquely swollen. Doctors gave his family a grim prognosis: Even if he survived, he would be severely disabled and probably unable to walk or talk. But Huerta came out of the coma and ultimately regained his ability to walk, his voice, driver’s license, independence and much of his former existence. Never mind that the first several years following the accident were filled with black holes. He learned that life goes on even with whole volumes of memory lost. Though he credits doctors with saving his life initially, his recovery relied on a regime he more or less devised on his own, which involved regular exercise with weights at a local gym and strategic Botox injections. Did his father Albert’s promise to God to give $1 million to the church if his son were restored explain Huerta’s astounding rebound? Huerta doesn’t know, but he does believe that “in the end the brain seemingly heals in a mystical manner.” In a stunning metaphor, he describes the process as a gradual unfolding: “Imagine a piece of artwork like the Mona Lisa, folded up and stuffed in a duffel bag,” he writes. “Your mind unfolds itself.” This kind of highly original insight pervades the book. The writing style is informal, conversational and forthright, and the short chapters make for easy reading. Accounts from family members and a close friend augment this portrait of a determined man who fought his way back from the abyss. “I wanted to live,” he says, summarizing it all.
Authentic and genuinely inspirational.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-304-40014-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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