A thoughtful and uncompromising account of the ravages of a terminal illness.
In this memoir, a man chronicles the emotional and physical burdens of living with Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In 2010, Methot began to experience the inexplicable signs of physical decline—an athletic man, he struggled to ski or play basketball with the robust agility he once enjoyed. He noticed that he seemed to lose the ability to play the saxophone and could no longer handle the consumption of alcohol with the same aplomb. He avoided confronting the issue—he became a “champion of self-serving delusion”—but finally the symptoms were too strong to ignore, and he sought the help of a doctor, who diagnosed him with ALS. At the time, the author was only 27 years old. Methot’s life was forever transformed—he became increasingly incapable of taking care of himself, eventually had to move back in with his parents, and finally needed the assistance of a wheelchair. With impressive precision and frankness, the author documents his experiences, including the terrible toll it took on him psychologically: “I mourn the loss of the person I used to be. I can’t be the only one. When my friends look at me, who do they see? Sometimes I feel like I’m already gone.” This is a bracingly candid memoir, one that makes a concerted effort to avoid the comforting platitudes of many self-help books. While this unwavering commitment to the hard truth of his circumstances is as admirable as it is refreshing, it can finally become gruelingly morose: “A positive attitude is not going to help; I’m not going to beat this.” Nevertheless, this remembrance, for all its understandable dourness, does not simply succumb to despair—Methot acknowledges the ways in which he is genuinely fortunate. This is a profoundly sad but also unflinching account of a life-altering sickness—readers will be impressed by the author’s intractable resistance to the allure of false hope, a refusal conveyed in subtly intelligent terms.
A thoughtful and uncompromising account of the ravages of a terminal illness.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 9781957184029
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Onion River Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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