An emotional and thought-provoking mix of poetic prose, memories, and beliefs on death, loss, and grief.
A Nova Scotia–based writer and photographer offers ruminations about grief by a mother who lost a son.
When Inglis’ (If I Were a Zombie, 2016, etc.) twin boys were born prematurely, one lived and one died after several weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. The author intertwines reflective meditations and memories of her experience with her tenets on grief that she has accrued from the years living with her ever present pain and sense of loss. “I’ve been falling for years,” she writes, “scrambling up again, sorting out in fits and spurts, freshly sorted reasonings collapsing in on themselves to make space for new wrack. I worry any mandate of mine is fresh paint on rotten wood.” In a text geared primarily toward those who have struggled with the unthinkable loss of a child, Inglis shares how she coped, joining marches and giving speeches, getting angry at well-meaning friends, and dealing with the depression that afflicted her. Through her intense grief, she learned to understand what it means to be alive, and she effectively shares her insights with readers: “As the only animals who know we will die, how should we live? This is the sweet and futile agony. It’s where every inner monologue comes from….Somehow, despite knowing loss will happen to us—and that our own ashes will someday be inside an urn on the lap of somebody who loved us—it’s still incomprehensible.” At times, Inglis gives her misery free rein, forcing readers to suffer alongside her as she relives the all-too-brief weeks she had with her son. In other passages, her wisdom rings out strong and clear and will strike a chord with anyone who has lost a loved one.
An emotional and thought-provoking mix of poetic prose, memories, and beliefs on death, loss, and grief.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61180-550-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Shambhala
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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