A compelling story about coping with a serious illness, offering lessons in the value of slowing down and appreciating life...
A hard-charging PR pro battles kidney failure, as chronicled in this heartfelt memoir.
Weeks before Christmas 1998, Frieden (The Offering, 2013) received devastating news. Her kidneys had stopped working; by the time she was admitted to the hospital, these essential organs were just 4 percent functional. Frieden, a self-described “blonde Amazon” in her early 30s, was highly educated, professionally successful, and athletic. With no history of prior health problems, she wasn’t sure how to cope with the diagnosis of anti-glomerular basement membrane disease, a rare autoimmune disorder. She began dialysis immediately, but the Bay Area resident, who previously had “lived at a frantic pace,” had difficulty adjusting to her new reality. “Delays and endless waiting, and then sitting for four long hours on dialysis, all violated what I valued most: the speed and efficiency that drive successful high tech PR,” she recalls. Eventually, she switched from traditional dialysis at a clinic to at-home peritoneal dialysis, which gave her more flexibility but presented its own challenges. Struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy, she continued to work full-time (and even took on a high-pressure new job) while waiting for her health to stabilize enough to receive a kidney transplant from her husband, Kurt. Despite the prosaic title and occasionally grim subject matter (kidney disease is often fatal), Frieden’s memoir is fresh and engaging. She takes time to discuss the reality of living with kidney disease and how her various surgeries and treatments changed her physical health and relationship with her body, but she gives equal weight to how the disease affected her emotionally. Frieden recounts how she eventually had to accept that “I no longer fit my life story,” a realization that led to a shift in perspective and a “simplicity of consciousness that nourished a profound peace.” This memoir will naturally be of interest to those with kidney problems and their loved ones, but it will also speak to anyone who’s led a life rocked by a personal crisis.
A compelling story about coping with a serious illness, offering lessons in the value of slowing down and appreciating life in the moment.Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1482678581
Page Count: 202
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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