by Sherry Blackman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2013
A sometimes flawed narrative that will yet engage the reader in a David-and-Goliath story pitting one brave woman against a...
Presbyterian minister, poet and journalist Blackman recounts the story of Jane Gagliardo, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and who sued a pharmaceutical corporation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
One morning, Jane Gagliardo woke up and could feel absolutely nothing. The diagnosis? MS. She ignored the doctor’s warning that she needed treatment. Having grown up with a violent, abusive father and a pill-popping mother, she faced more issues in her troubled life than this devastating disease, the existence of which she simply pushed to the back of her mind. Gagliardo got a coveted job at vaccine manufacturer, Connaught Laboratories, a job she came to love, despite the dreary, soot-filled sky that continually rained a substance that burned the paint from employees’ cars and threatened the health of workers. Gagliardo developed a telemarketing operation that served the company well. Her circumstances changed when, she says, a new boss began to persecute her, hovering in her workspace, dogging her every move, until finally the supervisor fired Gagliardo. Thus began the long fight waged by Gagliardo against her former employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act. For the most part, the author relates this confrontational legal battle with a keen sense of drama. This often engrossing tale loses some punch, however, due to basic errors. For example, the author miscalculates a date in the following: “The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990…became effective four years earlier in 1992.” Such factual lapses undermine the story’s credibility, as do occasional grammatical errors. “What was on trial here is so much more than discrimination,” Blackman writes, “her integrity, her character, her life was on trial.” Problems with subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, and misspellings occasionally creep into the text, diminishing the force of this compelling narrative struggle that pits Gagliardo against Connaught Laboratories.
A sometimes flawed narrative that will yet engage the reader in a David-and-Goliath story pitting one brave woman against a corporate giant.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0985822903
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broad Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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