by Kelly Perkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2007
Will inspire readers to live life to the fullest—and to sign an organ-donor card.
Memoirs of a survivor who wasn’t about to let a little thing like a heart transplant slow her down.
Perkins is a self-described “mountain girl” who loves physical activity, especially hiking and camping. From the day they met, she and husband Craig spent all their spare time and money pursuing adventures in the great outdoors. Then, she began to experience troubling symptoms like heart palpitations and shortness of breath. Cardiologists eventually determined that Perkins had picked up a virus that left her with an enlarged, scarred left ventricle and potentially fatal arrhythmia. These problems landed her in the hospital for weeks on end and eventually necessitated a transplant. Committed to staying fit and active, Perkins and her husband have in recent years scaled some of the world’s most awesome mountains, including Mt. Kilimanjaro. Though it makes a welcome contrast with fellow transplant survivor Amy Silverstein’s much more downbeat Sick Girl (2007), Perkins’s memoir does not merely chronicle a predictable triumph over the odds. Exciting mountaineering stories that will appeal to fans of Jon Krakauer share space with tender emotional passages. From her description of meeting Craig in college through her grateful account of the unstinting care he provided during her darkest days in the hospital, this is also the portrait of a marriage. The prose is variable. Sometimes Perkins grabs a cliché, and stale sentences like, “It was July 1992, my last days of innocence,” are all the more frustrating because many other passages are so vivid, bursting with fresh metaphors and images: “Our initial courtship was like cramming for a final exam.” Perkins emerges as a likable narrator, human and sympathetic with nary a touch of Pollyanna.
Will inspire readers to live life to the fullest—and to sign an organ-donor card.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7425-5877-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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