An intriguing and informative look at the challenges of disability.
Rudnick’s debut memoir examines her complicated relationship with her developmentally disabled sibling as well as her own tumultuous path to self-acceptance and fulfillment.
The author was born in New York City in 1944 to German immigrant parents, and her sister, Edna Jane Wile, was born a year later. As young children, the girls were inseparable, but when they entered school, it became increasingly apparent that Edna was lagging behind the other kids. She could read, but she couldn’t comprehend abstract concepts; she was mobile, but she was unable to walk with a normal gait; and she didn’t have any friends. The author, however, excelled in school and had an active social life. Increasingly, she felt guilty about leaving Edna behind; she saw her sister as a visual manifestation of her family’s differentness, she says, which embarrassed her and made her angry and confused. When Edna was 14, the girls’ mother found a camp/residential school in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which would cater to her special needs. “Except for vacations, we would never live together again,” Rudnick writes. The author soon discovered that she had her own, hidden disability—she’d been born without a uterus and with an incomplete vaginal canal. It was a devastating blow, she says, that affected the rest of her life. Rudnick is a talented writer, often displaying a keen ability to capture emotional intensity through concise prose. For example, she reveals at the memoir’s outset that “Edna was my most treasured companion” and “almost every night I crawled into her bed. With her soft skin, she was so cuddly, so squeezable. I felt safe when I was close to her.” As a result, readers are likely to be unsurprised that Rudnick eventually became a practicing psychotherapist. That said, the passages describing the author’s four marriages and three divorces sound clinically detached by contrast.
An intriguing and informative look at the challenges of disability.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-515-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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