An honest, intense look at a family’s experience with severe disability.
A matter-of-fact, revealing debut memoir by the sister of a severely disabled woman.
Sullivan’s older sister, Mikey, was born prematurely and lost her vision early in life. Initially, her blindness seemed to be her main challenge. At age 2, however, Mikey began to scream, and she seemed to stop feeling pain. Her ability to communicate or understand others became severely limited. She withdrew into her own world and never returned to any sort of normalcy. The term applied by physicians was “brain damaged,” although the author alludes to more modern and precise diagnoses of “intellectual disability” and “autism.” By the time Mikey was 12, her behavior—which included sporadic episodes of violence toward herself and others—necessitated her institutionalization, a decision that both agonized and relieved the family. Her experience at institutions, however, was often substandard and even abusive, and Sullivan pulls no punches in depicting a flawed system and flawed family members who were at the same time caring, doing what they could to help. While Mikey remained the center of the family’s life in many ways, Sullivan presents a robust, multidimensional story that reflects on her own journey beyond her relationship with her sister. Being an adolescent during the height of the 1960s “free love” and drug culture—combined with the emotional issues that emerged from her family life—set the stage for what the author calls a “perfect storm” that would translate into years marked by chaos and addiction. The memoir is often heartbreaking, but Sullivan’s depictions of a complicated and loving family and the unique issues faced by siblings of the severely disabled provide a sense of hope and closure.
An honest, intense look at a family’s experience with severe disability.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-270-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
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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