Reid vividly depicts both her husband’s sickness and her own feelings of loss and guilt in this memoir.
A recently widowed college professor looks back on her marriage and the death of her husband.
In 2015, Reid (Tillie Olsen, 2011, etc.) experienced “a loss that nearly destroyed my mind and life” when her husband, John Fischer, died after a four-month battle with a mysterious respiratory illness. She turned to writing about their marriage as a way of coping with her loss, and the result is worthy of comparison with classic memoirs of grief. The author, a professor of English, met Fischer on a visit to Louisiana State University in 1974, and they were married the following year. They were a devoted couple who shared a similar sense of humor and a passion for literature; Fischer was a leading scholar on the satirist Jonathan Swift. They would read the poems of Theocritus to their daughter and enjoy research assignments in England. The idyll ended after Fischer experienced spasms in his chest while shopping in January 2015. “Sat there until my lungs quit quivering,” he told her. Fischer’s death just four months later left the author “ravaged by guilt” and wrestling with a litany of things that she thinks she could have done to save him. But she found solace through writing the memoir and going on an African safari with her daughter, where their adventures “brought us close to nature, to each other, and to John’s spirit.” Throughout this book, Reid charts her spouse’s rapid physical decline with agonizing clarity—“John’s skin looked like a larger man’s hand-me-down bodysuit”—and she also makes convincing assertions that he was a victim of neglect by his doctors: “alarm bells should go off when doctors just keep offering the same hypotheses despite declining health,” she says. The author also points out that the best grief memoirs “provide both a powerful feel of the person lost and sharp insight into the writer herself.” Her own book passes that test with flying colors.
Reid vividly depicts both her husband’s sickness and her own feelings of loss and guilt in this memoir.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wild River Legacy
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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