An emotional account of a remarkable personal odyssey.
This biography chronicles a man’s sudden vision loss, his self-reinvention, and his seemingly miraculous partial recovery of sight.
In New York City in February 1997, Coughlin’s sight began deteriorating. Five days later, he was completely blind—stricken in his 30s by a rare, irreversible genetic disorder of the optic nerve that normally affects teens and young adults. Already alcohol-dependent, he was soon unemployed and dependent on disability checks. He confronted countless challenges in navigating city life, including physical barriers, inconsiderate strangers, and bureaucratic delays. In his favor, however, were his persistence and his preternatural ability to enlist help from others. For example, he persuaded a clerk to sell him a cane without the required mobility certification, and an ally at Gay Men’s Health Crisis helped him join a support group of HIV-positive blind people even though he was upfront about being HIV-negative. He continued to pursue his love of visual arts and photography by engaging a curator to narrate museum visits and a sighted Alcoholics Anonymous colleague to help take pictures. Coughlin also achieved sobriety and took up meditation, prayer, and ayurvedic practices. His physical and spiritual health improved, which helped him deal with the loss of another job and a beloved guide dog. Fifteen years after becoming blind, his sight began to return, but he already saw life differently. He began a journal (reprinted as an appendix), in which he cites “patience, prayer and turmeric” as “the corner stones of my journey out of the darkness.” Each chapter closes with a selected journal entry, foreshadowing and eventually merging with the narrative. Medford-Rosow and debut author Coughlin skillfully condense two decades into 33 easy-to-read vignettes about Coughlin’s challenges, setbacks, and breakthroughs. This results in a multilayered account that works on several levels, offering granular details of the blindness experience, detailing the difference between physical sight and personal vision, and highlighting the redemptive power of healing. The authors convey Coughlin’s spirituality and faith without being preachy, and they balance poignant moments with workaday complaints and unvarnished assessments of Coughlin’s behavior and relationships. The patient delivery allows this truly exceptional story to speak for itself.
An emotional account of a remarkable personal odyssey.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68350-784-0
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
