Moving.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Reston (Dogs of God, 2005, etc.) tells a harrowing, personal story about parenting a sick daughter.
Life was just about perfect: a successful writing career, a beautiful wife, three lovely children. Then tragedy struck. Reston’s youngest child, Hillary, fell ill. What started out as a seemingly run-of-the-mill fever turned into an illness that ravaged Hillary’s brain. (The Restons have never been certain what the illness actually is.) Though Hillary lived, she sustained severe brain damage, losing her ability to speak. Here, Reston chronicles two decades of family life. Gradually, he and his wife, Denise, move from tortured self-pity to an absolute adoration of Hillary and an understanding that she is wonderful just as she is. Hillary’s older siblings emerge as heroes, though near the end of the book (and none too soon) Reston reflects on the ways each of his older children has been shaped, and perhaps a bit scarred, by growing up in such stressful circumstances. There is real polemic threaded through this memoir—an insistence that disabled, retarded or handicapped children’s lives matter just as much as everyone else’s. (If you imagine that no one would say otherwise in this politically correct age, think again; sometimes even Hillary’s physicians suggest that, well, if her kidney failure kills her, maybe everyone will be better off.) The book is marred by Reston’s distracting insistence that mothers are more attentive to their kids than fathers and that they of course feel the sorrows of children’s illnesses more deeply. When describing his and Denise’s dreams about Hillary, “As usual, the mother’s dreams were more vivid.”
Moving.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8243-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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