by Louise DeSalvo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 1997
A deeply personal exploration of asthma that encompasses not simply the author's subjective experience, but its impact on some notable literary personages. There is a semblance of a journal here, but structure is not literary biographer DeSalvo's (English/Hunter Coll.; Conceived with Malice, 1994, etc.) concern. The occasional dated entries indicate that in late 1991 she became ill and in mid-1992 was finally diagnosed as having asthma, a treatable but chronic condition that drastically altered how she lives and works. Probably only a working writer would seek to understand asthma by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary or diagramming the subtly different sentences ``I have asthma'' and ``I am a person with asthma.'' And perhaps only a literary critic with asthma would feel compelled to read every book she can find by an asthmatic author or about an asthmatic character. The connection she feels with John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Isabel Allende, Elizabeth Bishop, and most of all Marcel Proust is evident as she studies how these writers interpreted and treated asthma and how it affected them. She discovers what she calls ``an asthma underground,'' finding stories about asthma and breathing difficulties everywhere: on the radio, in newspapers, magazines, and journals. What she concludes from these accounts, and from her own personal history, is that asthma is probably a manifestation of post-traumatic stress and that it is caused by terror, trauma, and abuse. Somewhere in the asthmatic's background, she asserts, is an emotional, physical, sexual, or environmental crisis, during which the individual was too frightened to breathe. No matter that this argument is not persuasive, DeSalvo succeeds in making the asthmatic attack—and the fear of one—palpable. When a scholarly critic and biographer selects as her topic of study her own asthma, one can expect something other than a run-of-the-mill report. DeSalvo delivers.
Pub Date: April 21, 1997
ISBN: 0-8070-7096-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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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