An enlightening and often moving memoir of one man’s struggle to live with a chronic and debilitating condition.
A journalist recounts his decadeslong struggle with epilepsy.
Veteran journalist Eichenwald (500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, 2012, etc.), a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, engrossingly relates his experiences with frequent epileptic seizures and the impact this condition has had on his life: “I have lived most of my life knowing I could be seconds from falling to the ground, seizing, burning, freezing, or worse….For years, I believed that each day might be my last, that I would die from an accident or a seizure or by my own hand. I lived in a boundless minefield, never knowing if I was a step away from triggering an explosion.” The author focuses mainly on his younger years, when he entered college up through his struggles to establish a foothold in his career. Central to his story are the grueling efforts he and his family faced trying to ensure his remittance to Swarthmore College. Through a combination of gross medical incompetence and disturbing administrative offenses within the college, Eichenwald was forced to leave during his first semester; he had to seek out extensive legal and medical intervention before he was able to continue his education. The author goes on to recount similar struggles in launching his early career. Throughout, Eichenwald brings his measured journalistic directness to the various dramas that enfold. His experiences pointedly reflect the challenges of trying to live a normal life while at the mercy of his condition, but more expansively, he relates the challenges that many disabled people face. He concludes each chapter with interview quotes, diary entries, and letters by various family members, close friends, and physicians. Though he mentions having kept these records as a means to organize his thoughts in response to increasing memory loss, their inclusion adds a somewhat cloying inspirational element that slightly undermines the strength and authority of the story he has to tell.
An enlightening and often moving memoir of one man’s struggle to live with a chronic and debilitating condition.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59362-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
