A lucid, unexpectedly uplifting, and affecting celebration of love that finds hope in despair.
A husband’s love for his wife intensifies after she is diagnosed with breast cancer in this memoir.
In 2000, Simon and his wife, Susan, were in their 34th year of marriage, a moment the author describes as “a perfect time of our lives.” That winter, their lives changed indelibly when Susan was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. Simon, having already experienced the death of his mother-in-law at the age of 56 from the same illness, girded himself for the worst. Whereas Susan, then 54, maintained a positive mental attitude, the author fell into depression and at times was afraid he was losing his mind. The memoir charts Susan’s journey, including her mastectomy and aggressive chemotherapy. But the focus is on Simon’s own struggles, describing out-of-body experiences in which he felt he had visited an imaginary ballroom. When his therapist suggested that these experiences brought dignity to a terrible moment, the author recognized his virtual ballroom as a sanctuary. This breakthrough inspired Simon to write and produce a play about his experience of his wife’s illness. The author describes with emotional clarity how uncomfortable procedures, such as administering an injection to Susan, surprisingly became acts of love: “I discover that I can do things I never thought possible and which creates a deep intimacy. Feeling, touching, and noticing are now different from before.” Simon adopts the same candid precision in describing his visions and his bid to understand them: “As I wander around this brilliant ballroom, I am filled with awe. The ballroom sits empty, hollow, pregnant with purpose and readiness. I am the only one here.” Some readers may feel that the author is unnecessarily wordy on occasion: “Wrongness extends beyond the here and now into the eternal, the stuff of primordial creation.” This can be overlooked given Simon’s dazzling eloquence when communicating his deepest fear of losing Susan: “This fear is not just about living alone; the fear is about being alone. The anticipation of losing part of myself will create an existential aloneness in the universe.” Happily, this moving book suggests that people’s fears are not always manifested in reality in quite the way they anticipated.
A lucid, unexpectedly uplifting, and affecting celebration of love that finds hope in despair.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73790-972-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Actual Dance LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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