A captivating, insightful memoir.
A diligent search for self through years of affliction.
Award-winning playwright Ruhl, a MacArthur fellow and two-time Pulitzer finalist, was pregnant when she opened a fortune cookie that contained a cryptic message: “Deliver that what is inside you, and it will save your life.” What was inside her turned out to be much more than fraternal twins. In a wise, intimate, and moving memoir, the author recounts a decade of illness, recovery, and self-transformation that followed her pregnancy. It began the day after delivering the twins, when the left side of her face became paralyzed; she had developed Bell’s palsy, a rare condition of nerve damage. She could not blink her left eye and, equally devastating, she could not smile. Although most people recover from Bell’s palsy within months, Ruhl’s persisted, causing not only physical discomforts—she had trouble eating and enunciating—but psychological and emotional distress. “Is the self the face?” she wondered as she became increasingly depressed at the facial asymmetry that seemed to her so “ugly.” Although she had considered herself a person of little vanity, now she “veered dangerously close to self-pity” and also self-blame for not getting better. Ruhl engagingly reports on her interactions with a host of therapists and medical practitioners—some brusque and dismissive, some caring and helpful; she even sought advice from a Tibetan lama. Sometimes, she admits, “I felt like anatomy rather than a whole.” A positive test for celiac disease helped to explain why nerve growth was inhibited, but it still took years before she could produce a semblance of a smile. Within her chronicle of illness, the author deftly weaves memories of her father; thoughts about motherhood, friendship, writing; and perceptive reflections about the meaning of smiling, especially for women. “I thought I could not truly reenter the world until I could smile again,” she writes; “and yet, how could I be happy enough to smile again when I couldn’t reenter the world?”
A captivating, insightful memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982150-94-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.
A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince.
Prince (1958-2016) contained multitudes, and every book about him seems to explore his aura through a different filter—musical, sexual, sartorial, religious, and so on. In this slim book, first published as an essay under a different title in Harper’s in 2012, Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic Als emphasizes Prince’s role as a queer Black icon, somebody who challenged the notion that “for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming.” Prince’s 1988 album Lovesexy wasn’t his most successful, but for Als, it represents the high point of Prince’s sexual fluidity, his "DJ-like mixing of homosexualist and heterosexualist impulses.” The author reads Prince’s defiance toward the mainstream record industry in the 1990s as symbolic of his effort to challenge the supremacy of heteronormative, White behavior. But Prince is still a slippery persona for Als: He writes about interviewing him backstage before a 2004 concert and being simultaneously charmed by him (his face “had the exact shape, and large eyes, of a beautiful turtle”) and put off, as when he evangelized on his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. Prince at once lamented male journalists who feared their femininity while projecting a "new, heterosexualized, Jesus-loving self.” At fewer than 50 pages, this book is too short to address Prince’s protean nature in depth. But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it’s undeniably engrossing. (Straight men felt that power, too: The book opens with a Jamie Foxx stand-up routine about having his hetero identity rocked by Prince.) In that regard, it’s a story about love in general, delighting in seeing yourself in a star, and lamenting when that star flickers in a different way.
A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3449-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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