Despite its flaws, this book may be useful for families affected by porphyria and may interest others frustrated by flawed...
A mother helps her daughter cope with a rare disease in this memoir.
Debut author Gould describes her yearslong quest to help her adopted daughter, Jill, who was afflicted with a rare genetic disorder called acute intermittent porphyria starting at age 11. Its symptoms include severe diarrhea, convulsions, and fainting; this caused problems at Jill’s Connecticut school, including frequent absences and trips to the hospital as well as bullying by other students. School officials were largely unsympathetic, the author says, even accusing Jill of being an “attention-seeking faker.” Gould also says that some doctors initially misdiagnosed the affliction, including one who decided that the girl suffered from bipolar disorder. After a genetic test linked Jill to AIP, she received infusions of a blood factor called heme, which seemed to help. But problems persisted, especially at school, leading Gould to believe that “a building filled with toxic chemicals and toxic people”—cleaners, wet erasers, and stress-inducing bullies—were triggering her daughter’s attacks. Tutoring and transfers to other schools didn’t solve the problem, however, although sometimes Jill did improve a bit. By the end of this sad tale, though, Jill is a suicidal heroin addict. In addition to her daughter’s tragic story, Gould also presents some AIP research and websites as well as some of Jill’s own first-person observations. Overall, this book offers a troubling account, and its broadest contribution is how it highlights the difficulties that people with unusual problems face in the American public school and health care systems. Although the author doesn’t prove that toxins at school triggered her daughter’s attacks, she makes some credible assertions. Unfortunately, she bogs the narrative down with too much description of bullying and “ridiculous middle school drama,” and her fondness for acronyms is distracting: “the PPT to set the IEP would be held at KPS.” The prose shows occasional flair, as when Gould describes when a baby Jill “plopped forward like a folded taco.” However, it sometimes suffers from clichés and repetition; for example, the author’s “head bells” always seem to be “clanging” or “jangling,” and people read one another “the riot act” more than once.
Despite its flaws, this book may be useful for families affected by porphyria and may interest others frustrated by flawed education and medical systems in the United States.Pub Date: June 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-988186-99-3
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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