With a mission of giving voice to the voiceless, Vallance shares the little-understood experience of surviving a traumatic...
A cathartic chronology of one woman who, rather than being defined by her disability, resolved to live by her own design.
In 1995, while visiting a friend’s farm, Sydney, Australia, native Vallance was thrown from a horse, striking her head against a rock. Feeling no worse for the wear, she wrote it off as a freak accident and returned home with a splitting headache. The next morning, everything seemed fine aside from the mystery of how her toaster ended up in the freezer. However, after a battery of hospital tests, the author was told that she suffered a traumatic brain injury. Going from a well-paying position in government and pursuing a doctorate in public administration to having an IQ of 80 and rapidly worsening memory loss, her new condition threw Vallance into depression and emotional turmoil, with which she has struggled since. Discovering the promise of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change throughout a person’s life, she was determined to finish her doctorate. Then she met Laura, a charming extrovert who became her first long-term lesbian partner and primary source of encouragement. In addition to introducing her many dog and cat companions, the author thoroughly explores the “lifetime of resentment” shared with her mother and pores over the dynamics of her other relationships. After winning a fellowship at Harvard, Vallance’s career pursuits carried her across continents, with stints in Singapore and Hong Kong, and then back to Australia, where she eventually met Louise, whom she eventually married. While certain sections of the narrative stray into a diarist’s minutiae, the book is powerful in its depiction of the author’s will to rise above the limitations of her disability rather than succumb to the obstacles and fears that encompass it.
With a mission of giving voice to the voiceless, Vallance shares the little-understood experience of surviving a traumatic brain injury.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4302-1
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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