A well-written, motivating book about managing disabilities and finding workarounds.
A business owner who has trouble reading shares insights and strategies.
In this debut self-help book, Manzanares focuses less on the mechanics of dealing with a learning disability—in his case, a lifelong difficulty with reading that was never formally diagnosed—and more on strategies for surmounting the extra challenges that are part of living with a disability. The book addresses both parents of children with learning disabilities and readers (or listeners; the book is also available in audio) who have such conditions. Through his own anecdotes and insights gained from his wide reading on related topics, Manzanares encourages readers to be realistic about their difficulties without letting those difficulties limit their objectives. Manzanares draws connections between the skills (“my superpowers”) that allowed him to make it through school— memorization, asking for help—and what has made him successful as an adult, reminding readers frequently that coping techniques are legitimate ways of overcoming a problem, rather than cheating: “When speaking with your child or loved one about their challenge or reading disability, help them see it as a means of amplifying another ability they might have.” The book’s frank, reassuring tone, with Manzanares willing to share his failures as well as his successes (“If I had to do it over again? Honestly, I’m not sure” he writes of sharing his disability with his employees), makes for an engaging narrative and solidifies Manzanares’ status as a reliable, generous mentor. Although the guide doesn’t focus on explaining dyslexia or teaching the reader about specific tools, the recommendations of technologies (audiobooks, Grammarly, dictation software) and resources Manzanares finds most helpful are among the guide’s strengths. Readers from marginalized communities may also appreciate the perspective that Manzanares, a member of the Puyallup Tribe, brings to the topic.
A well-written, motivating book about managing disabilities and finding workarounds.Pub Date: June 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1415-4
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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