A syrupy yet heartwarming tale of roiling emotions and the power of love.
A stirring account of New York Yankees star Posada's family's struggle with their child's difficult condition, craniosynostosis.
This is a lovely story of terrible circumstance, told by Jorge and his wife, Laura, and the authors bring a respectable polish to their honest storytelling, despite some heavy-handed sentiment and a few goofy puns: “I knew deep down that if I played my cards right, she could very well become the greatest catch of my life.” Their son Jorge Jr. came as a bit of a surprise, and the immediacy of his medical condition—a life-threatening skull deformity—hit the authors hard. In alternating voices, the Posadas write with a natural economy and immediacy of emotion: “How could I not imagine that he was going to die? It crossed my mind that this might be the last time I would ever get to put my son to sleep,” writes his mother as her nine-month-old son is readied for surgery. “Was he in pain? Was he suffering? Would he always suffer?” asks his father. These were a couple of type-A achievers who had to manage their self-involvement, irritability, exhaustion, depression and embarrassment, and find a way to patience, perseverance, fortitude and confidence. Ultimately, all those traditional virtues paid dividends. The Posadas turned their suffering into initiative, starting an advocacy group to bring help to those with craniosynostosis, funding research and offering critical support to families.
A syrupy yet heartwarming tale of roiling emotions and the power of love.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0308-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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