A moving portrait of “young love turning into old love” in the face of unexpected life challenges.
An award-winning author recounts how her husband’s treatment to alleviate chronic back pain wreaked unexpected havoc on his health and their relationship.
When Goldman’s (Losing My Sister, 2012, etc.) husband, Henry, saw an advertisement for injections that alleviated spine problems, he eagerly made an appointment. Surgery had been ineffective in curing chronic back pain, and engaging in the athletic activities he loved—jogging, racquetball, and tennis—had become impossible. Rather than cure him, the treatment left Henry paralyzed from the waist down. The doctor insisted all would be well despite disturbing signs to the contrary. Goldman, who was “too timid to take charge,” suddenly found herself having to fight a medical establishment that could not explain what had gone wrong. Henry did regain some, but not all, feeling; with physical therapy, he also regained the ability to walk. But for the next several years, he endured worsening pain, blood clots, knee replacement, and, eventually, total shoulder replacement due to an “altered gait and awkward posture.” When the pair eventually tried to take legal action to compensate for Henry’s suffering, they were told they did not have a strong enough case to sue for damages. The author watched her husband struggle and observed how extreme stress caused her to display her most “unlovely self.” At the same time, she also pondered their past and the new normal of their present. The shifts that threatened to tear their relationship apart forced both Goldman and her husband to assume new roles and expand old identities in ways they could never have foreseen. For all their trials, they emerged more bonded than ever. Honest and compassionate, Goldman’s book is a life-affirming story that celebrates the grit that goes into making a long-term marriage work.
A moving portrait of “young love turning into old love” in the face of unexpected life challenges.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54394-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-written, often poignant and surprisingly relatable.
Memoir of a literature professor who converted to Christianity in the halls of Oxford University.
Coming home for the holidays, Weber (English/Seattle Univ.) had a handsome young man with a jewelry box in his pocket waiting for her at the gate. Most girls would be excited, but not the author. As her ex–fiancé-to-be awaited her arrival, Weber found herself confiding to a concerned stranger that she'd been thinking about someone else: Jesus. It's an inauspicious beginning for a conversion story, inciting the same adverse reaction in readers as the author’s agnostic friends—nice, well-educated girls do not break up with their boyfriends and become Christians. But a lot has changed since Weber began her graduate studies at Oxford, an establishment where semesters with names like "Michaelmas" and "Hilary" frame a touching narrative of friendship, love and faith. There, the author was just as often inspired by Keats and the Beatles as she was by the Gospel. Weaving lines of poetry, philosophy and scripture into her narrative, Weber grasps at the meaning of life in the pages of great works of literature and overcomes her own childhood cynicism. Ultimately, a boy she refers to as TDK (i.e., tall, dark and handsome) won her heart and encouraged her to convert. When normal, 20-something trials ensued, notably a visit from a Georgia Peach in designer stilettos who threatened to steal her crush, the author’s new faith was put to the test. The delicately crafted moments when Weber’s faith allowed her to think more clearly and walk more gracefully through her life are, much like her romance, worth the wait.
Well-written, often poignant and surprisingly relatable.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8499-4611-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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