A bittersweet mingling of previous life-changing events and present-moment illness by a skillful author.
The author’s journey “from the emotional storms…of widowhood to the astonishment of finding new love in my senior years, and on to the sudden cardiac crisis…that forced me, finally, to confront a past that I had never put wholly to rest.”
After Lear's (Where Did I Leave My Glasses?: The What, When, and Why of Normal Memory Loss, 2008, etc.) first husband died from a series of heart attacks, she detailed her struggle in her first book, the acclaimed Heartsounds (1980). What she didn't anticipate was that almost 30 years later, she would also experience a heart attack and wind up in the exact same hospital, in the same cardiac unit, with the same doctor, no less, as her husband. Lear provides rich, poignant details of her own attack, as well as her travels through the medical establishment from one test to another. The ghosts of those moments spent with her first husband in those same hospital hallways continually haunted her, and Lear leaned heavily on the past to help her cope with the often bewildering moments of the present. Her second husband was always by her side to assist in any way he could, and a host of nurses and doctors also helped out, attempting to understand why she had the attack and then contracted a serious staph infection, which caused her leg to become unbearably painful and unusable. However, as any patient knows, there is only so much a spouse, doctor or nurse can do, as sickness of any kind is a solitary journey. Lear maneuvers through the weeks she spent in the hospital with the adroitness of someone who's been down this road before.
A bittersweet mingling of previous life-changing events and present-moment illness by a skillful author.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4615-5
Page Count: 127
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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