A heartfelt, inspiring, and deeply moving chronology of substance abuse and enduring, unconditional familial love.
A woman faces drug addiction when it arrives on her doorstep in the form of family.
As a wife and mother of three children, the North Carolina author knew how important support, guidance, and unconditional love were to a child. Her parental courageousness was put to the test when her brother John shared a serious issue involving his 29-year-old son, Bobby, who became addicted to back pain medication in college and then moved on to heroin. Years spent in and out of rehabilitation facilities had worn Bobby down, and now he was on the streets and feeling suicidal. In 2013, Hodges (co-author: The Triangle Home Book, 1989) welcomed him into her and her husband Will’s home and embarked on a year that proved to be one of the couple’s greatest and most emotionally challenging periods. When a close friend lost her own son to an overdose, the reality of Hodges’ family situation hit home. Despite becoming buoyed by regular contact with her psychologist, the author struggled to relate to Bobby’s late-night pacing, emotional immaturity, the staggering amount of physician-prescribed, mood-altering medications he took daily, and his sky-high drug tolerance that made a scheduled colonoscopy impossible. Throughout the stirring memoir, Hodges deftly weaves in personal impressions about her life, her checkered past with her brother, and her strained marriage to Will. She notes that she considered herself blessed and “privileged,” which made her sense of empathy and compassion for others heightened, especially when Bobby began to open up emotionally to her in the early stages of his stay with her and Will. As days turned to weeks, Hodges soothed her anxiety around Bobby by enacting house rules that restricted him from stealing, lying, and using drugs but that also proactively offered direction, purpose, and tools for his much-needed stabilization. In her richly detailed account, the author recalls her myriad reactions to Bobby’s plight. Lacking experience in caring for an addict, Hodges was initially hopeful but soon became exhausted with the obsessive push and pull of drug compulsion and fragmented emotions that had become her nephew’s sole existence. Bobby’s eventual relapse and sudden departure took her by surprise but seemed somehow necessary in order to bring them closer together. Her ordeal is strikingly personal and lyrically told through emails (to herself, therapeutically, as well as to others), narration, drug-related articles, and bittersweet memories of her own history of trying to come to terms with a formerly close-knit family that fractured after her father died. “Addiction is exhausting and relentless,” she writes in a poignant section pondering the emotional and physical toll drug abuse had taken on her entire family. Hodges’ bracing year with Bobby ended on an upbeat note as her nephew took the initiative to embrace a fulfilling life structured around work, school, and recovery. The author closes her engrossing story with sobering facts and useful resource materials on the drug abuse epidemic suffocating the nation.
A heartfelt, inspiring, and deeply moving chronology of substance abuse and enduring, unconditional familial love.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-375-5
Page Count: 349
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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