A must-read for disabled readers seeking inspiration for their dreams, and will hold the interest—and crush the excuses—of...
The impressive story of a woman who will eventually be duly recognized as a pioneer in disabled athletics.
Reinertsen, whom readers may recognize from her 2006 appearance on The Amazing Race, was born with proximal femoral focal deficiency in her left leg—“a shortened leg bone that’ll never grow.” At age seven, she had part of it amputated so she could use a prosthetic that provided greater mobility. The author—assisted by veteran ghostwriter Goldsher (co-author: Dancing to the Music in My Head: Memoirs of the People’s Idol, 2009, etc.)—credits much of her success to the insistence of her parents, both from Norwegian immigrant families, on treating her like a normal kid. Throughout, her mother is depicted as an endless source of support. Although her father’s abuse and extramarital affair kept the family in therapy for nearly a decade, he provided a modicum of assistance by seeking out Reinertsen’s eventual role model, amputee marathoner Paddy Rossbach, at a race near their home in Long Island. Twelve-year-old Reinertsen marveled at Rossbach’s grace and speed, and saw that a “normal,” fulfilled life was possible for amputees. The author similarly inspires readers with her story, if one can consider her extraordinary experiences normal: world records for above-knee amputee women in the 100- and 200-meter races, the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona, multiple academic degrees, the Ironman in Hawaii (she was the first woman to complete it on an artificial leg), interviewing Olympic stars in one of several TV-production gigs and climbing the Great Wall of China on a hit reality show. Though the compelling content occasionally descends into the clichéd prose of many commercial inspirational memoirs—with lazy adjectives like “insane amped-ness” and “moving/amazing/incredible”—Reinertsen’s vulnerability and ebullience have a way of sneaking through in passages about intimacy with her first boyfriend (when should she take the leg off?) and how her emotional Ironman triumph helped heal her family.
A must-read for disabled readers seeking inspiration for their dreams, and will hold the interest—and crush the excuses—of those training for marathons and triathlons.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7627-5143-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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