by Noel Holston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2019
A worthwhile memoir about hearing impairment and struggling with the complex medical community.
After losing most of his hearing in 2010, a journalist’s frustration mounted as insurance and the medical community entangled him in red tape.
As a music lover who had spent much of his career in coverage and criticism of popular culture, Holston faced a shocking transition when he awoke one morning to discover that he could barely hear anything. Though there had been warning signs—hearing aids and measurable loss—this was sudden, unexpected, and close to absolute. Thus began an extended period of difficult adjustment: communicating at work with colleagues by email and pen on paper, navigating marital turbulence, dealing with strangers who didn’t understand his condition or who thought he lacked mental capacity. But the biggest issue was trying to figure out what had happened and how to fix it. Doctors weren’t absolutely sure on the former, and their attempts to address the latter caused even more frustration when an expensive cochlear implant failed to help. This left the author wondering “whether something was still wrong with me systemically, something as yet undetected that was rendering the implant less effective, or whether the implant itself might be a problem.” Consultations with other doctors meant he had to go out of his insurance network, and haggling over the phone became nearly impossible due to his condition. This book is partly about how hearing loss affects every aspect of one’s life, partly about how dealing with insurance can make life a living hell, and partly about the effects on a marriage from such unexpected strains. “Years of writing and columnizing on a daily basis had made writing reflexive to me,” writes Holston. “I try not to let any experience go to waste. To paraphrase an old saying, that which doesn’t kill you makes for a good story.” An appendix includes useful information about the benefits and risks of cochlear implants.
A worthwhile memoir about hearing impairment and struggling with the complex medical community.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5107-4687-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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