Price’s story is intriguing, but ultimately fails to shed light on a little-understood subject.
Think having near-perfect recall would be a huge asset? The first person ever diagnosed with hyperthymestic syndrome begs to differ.
“Imagine if someone had made videos of you from the time you were a child,” writes Price in a memorable description of what it’s like to recall practically every detail from your life, “and then combined them all onto one DVD, and you sat in a room and watched that DVD on a machine set to shuffle randomly through the tracks…I never know what I might remember next.” She wasn’t afflicted by this “gift” during her childhood in New York and New Jersey. But when her father was offered a promotion from talent agent to TV executive and moved the family to California in the fall of 1974, eight-year-old Price’s mind began to fill up with memories of every minute in her past. After February 5, 1980, she states, she had perfect recall. This endlessly distracting ability caused her to become a pack rat with possessions and obsessive-compulsive about recording her experiences (the total number of pages in her journals tops 50,000). In 2000, Price connected with Dr. James L. McGaugh, professor emeritus at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, who began to study her heretofore unknown but quite real condition. Price has a knack for vividly rendering childhood memories like scenes from an impressionistic film. The chronicle of her adult life, unfortunately, is told in stiff, repetitive prose that leaches out much of her story’s impact. The memoir’s effectiveness as a personal document is further muffled by a large amount of material on memory research presented in an overly general fashion.
Price’s story is intriguing, but ultimately fails to shed light on a little-understood subject.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6176-7
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
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
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