by Stuart Maloney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2011
The book tells the story of a young man’s life in a way that will make readers almost forget his cerebral palsy—but they’ll...
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An engaging memoir from a man who has lived 26 years with cerebral palsy.
Maloney was born dead after a complicated delivery. He started breathing 26 minutes later, just as doctors were about to give up their resuscitation efforts. After 18 months, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and given 16 years to live. His memoir describes his first 26 years of life through a series of historical vignettes, anecdotes, tributes to friends and family and diatribes against a series of apparently incompetent health-care professionals in and around his home of Peterborough, England. He writes frankly about his condition and how it has affected virtually every aspect of his life: his early school years, his friendships and encounters with bullies and other ignorant people, his sex life. He emerges as a likable, funny, angry, happy, mature, successful young man who just happens to have mild cerebral palsy. And a seizure disorder resulting from a bout of whooping cough. And renal vasculitis resulting from sheer bad luck. Maloney never descends into self-pity, preferring instead to highlight the “benefits” of his brand of cerebral palsy (his shaky fingers enhance the pleasure of his lady friends, and police sympathy for his “disability” has saved him from at least one speeding ticket). He saves his anger for those who stereotype people with cerebral palsy as drooling, spastic wheelchair-riders who lack intrinsic value. He relates his almost accidental lawsuit against the National Health Service that eventually brought him a 1 million pound settlement that enables him to live on his own. Maloney remains resilient, strong and hopeful. “I found my life policy when I died at birth,” he writes, “and every day I try to live my life in accordance with words that I wrote and had tattooed on me so I don’t forget them: Forever my spirit breathes from within/Never will it leave or give in.” Readers will know he’s going to keep on striving.
The book tells the story of a young man’s life in a way that will make readers almost forget his cerebral palsy—but they’ll want to remember.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1467007887
Page Count: 236
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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