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RETHINKING POSSIBLE

A MEMOIR OF RESILIENCE

A touchingly honest, pleasantly sarcastic, and thought-provoking account that focuses on resilience.

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In this debut memoir, a seasoned newspaper columnist details her struggles to overcome a series of tragedies that upended her life.

Galli, born in the late 1950s, was raised in a close, loving family. The daughter of a well-respected North Carolina Baptist minister, she was the first of three children: her brother, Forrest, and sister, Rachel, quickly followed. The family ate, played, and prayed together. Life was orderly, predictable, and happy—until Labor Day weekend, 1978, when Forrest was killed in a water skiing accident. Galli writes: “The gaping hole in our tightly woven fivesome was too large for us to mend for each other. So we splintered, each taking a different path to heal.” This was only the first challenge to the author’s carefully designed life plans. In 1981, she married Joe: “We were two Type A’s ready to join forces to see what we could accomplish. Together. Forever.” Their first child, Brittany, was born in June 1987: “The timing was perfect, just as planned.” Things would not continue to go as expected. Of Galli’s next five pregnancies, one ended in a miscarriage and two produced special needs children. The strain of Joe’s very successful career and the child care demands that kept the author at home brought the marriage to a breaking point. In 1997, they divorced. Only nine days later, she contracted a “one-in-a-million” virus that would leave her permanently paralyzed from the waist down. In her poignant and courageous book (which includes many photos), Galli pulls no punches, as she chronicles her emotional journey through a life that had to be totally restructured. Rage, tears, frustrations, denial, and doubts spill from the pages through articulate, conversational prose. (An experienced writer, Galli has produced hundreds of columns for the Baltimore Sun.) She shares all the difficulties she faced in this book, including the intimate complexities of her new reality—bathroom complications, the dangers of unfelt skin abrasions, and mysterious pains where there are no other sensations. Acceptance was slow in coming: “Letting go of dreams was loss, just as real as the loss of the use of my legs.” But fierce determination lifts the narrative tone: “Life isn’t about what you’ve lost, but about what you’ve learned—and what you do with what you have left.”

A touchingly honest, pleasantly sarcastic, and thought-provoking account that focuses on resilience.

Pub Date: June 13, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-63152-220-8

Page Count: 330

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

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