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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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