A plaintive but fiery plea that clearly shows the strength of the author’s convictions.
In this debut memoir, a black single mother fights a losing battle against Idaho institutions on behalf of her disabled daughter.
The author asserts that God saved her daughter, Robyn, when she suffered a stroke in 2007. Myers-Edwards now seeks to reveal the medical negligence that caused her daughter’s stroke; the legal ineptitude and deception that prevented the author from pressing her case; and the uncaring systems that blocked her attempts for recourse at every step. After her divorce, Myers-Edwards moved to Idaho with her children to seek a fresh start for her family. Robyn started to experience odd, numbing episodes, and the author took her to a physician for a diagnosis. He prescribed Zomig, an anti-migraine medication. Robyn took the drug following another episode and had a stroke shortly after. Suddenly she was fighting for her life in a hospital, and Myers-Edwards had to leave her work at the Idaho Department of Labor to care for her. The doctors were pessimistic, but Robyn slowly recovered after her family prayed. Her routine had to be readjusted, with an Individualized Education Plan and an aide to support her through school. In 2009, Myers-Edwards began her malpractice case against the physician who prescribed Zomig. But, she charges, she soon realized that changes had been made to her daughter’s medical records that supported his actions (a history of headaches). According to the author, her lawyer lied to her about expert witness testimony and mysteriously decided to withdraw from the case. Myers-Edwards then became aware of a larger pattern. The author contends that the Idaho Falls Police Department quietly silenced her official complaints: It stopped responding to her emails after claiming to take on the investigation. From the beginning of her moving book, Myers-Edwards passionately discloses her intentions to expose wrongdoing. She tells readers that she suspects her story could be evidence of racism in the Idaho government. Examining the witness testimony, correspondence, and official records included in this lucid work, readers can easily spot the inconsistencies for themselves. But without further interviews, sources, and research, the account isn’t able to dig very far into the details of the corruption the author claims she witnessed. Still, her stirring tale demonstrates the challenge that obtaining legal justice can pose in America for anyone without vast financial resources.
A plaintive but fiery plea that clearly shows the strength of the author’s convictions.Pub Date: June 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4974-4017-3
Page Count: 211
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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