A prideful father further memorializes the life of his son, who was born with Down syndrome.
In this sequel to Life As We Know It (1996), Bérubé (Literature/Penn State Univ.; The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read, 2016, etc.) continues his compassionate chronicling of his son Jamie’s life. This book picks up 20 years after the first and finds the boy in adulthood facing the many challenges of being a productive young man in the sometimes-indifferent modern world. The author addresses these contemporary hurdles through illuminating chapters on his son’s emotional development, the protectiveness and nurturing relationship with Jamie’s older brother, Nick, and Jamie’s complex sadness and confusion when his brother left for college. Embedded in a chapter on his son’s physical well-being are the author’s own perspectives on such topics as unnecessary amniocentesis and the state of American health care. In other sections, Bérubé shares anecdotes on Jamie’s trial-and-error exposures to travel and culture and how he overcame a fear of water to become a competitive swimmer at 17 in the Special Olympics. Perhaps most engaging are the stories of Jamie’s educational accomplishments and subsequent search for gainful employment, which became the subject of a heartfelt 2014 essay. To their credit, both the author and his wife have raised Jamie to the best of their abilities as compassionate parents, though the book is very much told from Bérubé’s own perspective. Janet, somewhat disappointingly, appears much less in this book than in the author’s first, and readers may miss her encouraging voice. While the author clearly paints the life of an adult with Down syndrome as one hinging on the compassion and understanding of others, he also paints Jamie’s experience and immersion into the world as a story of triumph, bravery, independence, and great self-awareness.
An inspiring family scrapbook offering hopeful reinforcement for parents in similar situations.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1931-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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