Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.
The author, a life-threatening-illness support leader and wife of the late actor Patrick O’Neal, recalls a roller-coaster life that steadied into meaningful depth.
With a light hand, O’Neal makes it clear that her life could have taken her to a very different place than where she is now as an emotional-support figure at Friends In Deed, a crisis center for critically ill people that she founded. Before she met her husband she was already an actress and successful model, and he brought just that much more glamour to her days. They lived in a series of envy-inducing apartments, moved in the company of tony friends and had the wherewithal to act on their desires. O’Neal recounts plenty of tribulations as well—her husband’s drug and drinking problems, a son who appeared to be taking after his father, the deaths of friends and acquaintances, which began to steamroll as the AIDS epidemic made its way through her milieu of artists. The deaths tripped a switch. “I could not live with the idea that someone was ill, frightened, alone, and not try to do something about it,” she writes. Any do-gooder suspicions are neatly laid to rest by O’Neal’s frequent skirmishes with her motivations and her candor about her ill-preparedness for such passion. “I think crisis holds a real seduction for me, and certainly there is some magical thinking involved,” she writes. “There’s a primal place in me that thinks that if I do my very best to help other people in their crises, disaster will stay away from me and mine.” Eventually, many of the “me and mine” became the men and women who found themselves at Friends In Deed, a handful of whom are profiled here with respect and honor. O’Neal made her share of mistakes, and her spiritual quest to face death is rocky, but she doesn’t lose sight of those who benefit from her compassion.
Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58322-906-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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