A compassionate mother-daughter memoir written with inspiration, empathy and hope.
The story of a mysterious medical ailment that blindsided a tightly knit family.
Jackson, a successful cosmetics entrepreneur, writes in her prologue about surviving a turbulent, insecure childhood fraught with emotional neglect and exacerbated by a violent sexual assault she endured as a teenager. These experiences seem to have prepared her to deal with the sudden onset in her teenage daughter, Ali, of an extremely rare, crippling autoimmune disorder called Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disease, which attacks the optic nerve and the central nervous system. Ali’s eyesight and pain levels worsened, and she was given four or five years to live. Jackson shifted into “warrior mode” and began canvassing the Los Angeles medical community for answers. A stay at the Minnesota Mayo Clinic initiated several radical chemotherapy treatments, though each debilitating stage further compromised Ali’s youthful dreams of excelling on the tennis courts. Interwoven through mother’s and daughter’s individual accounts of shock, denial, resignation and eventual acceptance are lighter scenes in which Jackson appeals to holistic healers for alternative solutions to the needles and MRIs of traditional medicine. She leavens the unsettling details of her daughter’s daunting ordeal with a personal history of her romance with infomercial magnate Bill Guthy and her progression from Hollywood makeup artist to cosmetic guru. Fully immersing herself in Ali’s malady, Jackson became medically knowledgeable about an obscure disease and ultimately founded a charitable foundation for the education and eradication of NMO. The closing “Thriver’s Guide” by Ali provides a brief five-step plan for those coping with the ailment.
A compassionate mother-daughter memoir written with inspiration, empathy and hope.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1593157333
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vanguard/Perseus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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