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