An edgy, thought-provoking, and informative insider’s view of a frequently misunderstood disability.
A debut memoir from a woman who found a unique remedy for the social anxiety caused by her lifelong stuttering.
G. isn’t the first person in her family to suffer from a disability, she says: “My father was born with hearing loss, as was his father and his father’s mother.” G.’s hearing was fine, but her stuttering was compounded by dyslexia, both of which became serious problems for her in third grade. Fortunately, her supportive parents were active in ensuring that she had the best instructors that the California educational system could offer. She would go on to graduate with a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and she later received a doctorate in psychology. At heart, G. is a teacher—she’s a community college professor—and she brings that skill to her memoir, detailing, in plain English, the scientific underpinnings of stuttering and how someone with speech difficulties may become, for example, a successful singer: “stuttering is thought to originate from somewhere in the left side of the brain, near the area that produces speech….on the right side of the brain, you have the areas that produce the functions of intonation or singing.” G. also writes of her passion for comedy; starting in, she bravely pursued stand-up comedy, and she still relishes performing at open-mike nights in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her often funny, salty, and justifiably angry prose articulates the frustrations that she faced as a stutterer in the “fluent” world, including the irritation of being interrupted during a word block, the psychological impact of being discounted and mocked, and the self-imposition of silence in an effort to make listeners comfortable. Some of the jokes that she includes here may work better in a live setting than then they do on the page, but others are sure to have readers laughing out loud.
An edgy, thought-provoking, and informative insider’s view of a frequently misunderstood disability.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-642-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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