Summary:

The lives of writer Cathy Crimmins, her lawyer husband Alan Forman, and their seven-year-old daughter were changed forever on July 1, 1996, at a lake near Kingston, Ontario. "Alan’s brain got run over by a speedboat. That last sentence reads like a bad country-western song lyric, but it’s true. It was a silly, horrible, stupid accident." (p. 5). While Alan steered a small boat back to dock at the end of their vacation, a teenager drove a speedboat literally over him, causing major traumatic brain injury (TBI) including seizures, coma, hemorrhage and paralysis.

Crimmins chronicles her husband’s remarkable recovery with a mix of humor, medical information, anger at HMO denial of benefits, and gratitude for the care of physicians, nurses, therapists, EMT, friends and family during this grueling, and in many ways, never-ending ordeal. Although Alan survived -- and is now capable of walking, speaking, reading, loving, working and driving -- he is a different person. The injury to his frontal lobes causes him to be disinhibited, erratic, angry, irrational, petulant, obsessive, devoted yet cruel to his daughter, and prone to severe "cognitive fatigue."

TBI is a bizarre, unpredictable illness. Crimmins notes that the degree of Alan’s recovery is atypical for the force of his trauma. In addition, TBI survivors say and do wacky things: "Where is the mango princess?" was one of Alan’s first utterances after emerging from his coma. Alan’s pre-accident sharp-edged humor was replaced by bland affability and a disturbingly vacant gaze. Yet some of what he says and does is heart wrenching and poignant.

The book clearly documents that the trauma is not limited to the patient. As Crimmins so eloquently and honestly recounts, she, her daughter, and all who knew Alan were traumatized by the accident and its aftermath.

Crimmins is an aggressive caregiver, thrust kicking and fighting into the caregiver role. Her advocacy for her husband, including research into the best rehabilitation facility, day hospital, vocational rehabilitation program, doctors, therapists, etc., was unwavering and crucial to his optimal care and outcome.

View full annotation

Summary:

The story opens two years into the writer's undiagnosed hematological disorder, focusing the narrative on the two most significant issues in this young woman's life--her first experience with a love relationship that is to result in a long-term commitment, and the disease that for years is to affect the way she lives her day-to-day life. Breslin describes in considerable detail her encounters with hospitals and health care professionals, none of whom are able to diagnosis nor prognosticate but continue to treat each new symptom as it arises.

In the midst of this uncertainty which pervades the memoir, are the subtexts of the love between the author and her husband and the relationship she maintains with her father. The reader, presumably like the author herself, never learns the name of the mysterious illness that informs the tale.

View full annotation

Summary:

Banishing Verona concerns a 22-year-old house painter living in London. One soon realizes that Zeke Cafarelli is not normal. He has had a nervous breakdown a few years earlier; collects clocks--he has nine at the beginning of the novel and adds two more by novel's end--which he takes apart and restores; he has basic questions about interpersonal relations that, were it not for his illness, mentioned once, briefly and vaguely (24), one would describe as childlike naiveté.

For example, he wonders why people lie. Or, why is it so easy to identify vegetables (his parents are greengrocers) but not people each time one encounters them in even slightly different settings? Several times the author describes Zeke's mother or father (whom Zeke calls Gwen and Don, respectively) while their son is trying to confirm their identity as his parents.

Quite early in the narrative, like a dea ex machina, Verona MacIntyre enters Zeke's life. Or perhaps Venus on the half shell would be a more specific identification of the dea, since Verona is pregnant, and soon becomes as naked as Venus in the famous painting by Botticelli, to whose paintings Zeke is likened with his angelic appearance and lustrous hair. The two become oceanic--if not star-crossed--lovers-at-first-sight since Verona has to traipse off to Boston to help bail her sociopathic brother out of yet another financial and amorous mess of his own making. Despite the appearances of Jigger (Verona and Henry's grandfather in the persona of a long letter to Verona), and Toby (a mutual lover-friend of Verona and Henry), and Maurice (Gwen's lover), the plot does not seem unwieldy.

View full annotation

Summary:

During  the Dutch Golden Age, religion and medical science were combined in people's minds to the extent that illness, especially plague, was seen as a punishment from God. In the minds of  many Dutch seventeenth-century Calvinists, God was vengeful and often angry with the sinner. As Matton shows in this fictional monologue of an illiterate peasant woman, Hendrickje Stoffels (1626-1663), when plague swept through the city of Amsterdam, the afflicted person had three ways of fighting the disease: prayer, folk remedies, and the ministrations of the plague doctors. But for Hendrickje, prayer held first place.Hendrickje Stoffels modeled for several Rembrandt works. She was one of the three most important women in the life of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669).

He was first married to Saskia van Uylenburgh, who bore him 4 children. Only Titus,their son, survived. As Saskia lay dying of tuberculosis, Rembrandt hired Geertje Dircx  (c.1610-1656) as Titus's wetnurse. She became Rembrandt's lover. Hendrickje entered his household and began a relationship with the painter in the late 1640s. As Geertje was being forced out of the home, Rembrandt started paying her an annuity; later, she sued Rembrandt for breach of marriage contract. He had her removed to a prison/insane asylum. Hendrickje bore him a daughter, Cornelia (1654),the only one of his five children to survive their father.

The book begins when Hendrickje is 23 years old and Rembrandt 42. Matton's book cover shows Rembrandt's painting, Hendrickje Bathing (1655). This and several other paintings of his lover illustrates Rembrandt's passion for Henrickje who  devoted her life to the artist, to Titus, and Cornelia. We read the experiences articulated by the deeply religious Hendrickje as she moves around Rembrandt's home and studio, and the streets of Amsterdam. She thinks that  cats and dogs, not rats, carry the plague.  She notices wounded war veterans with open sores in the streets, lepers, and public whippings and executions. She is obsessed with the worms that live in the body and cause plague and death. Cherries also cause the plague.

In 1654, the City Fathers summon her, pregnant, accusing her of whoredom--hence the title of the book. She endures an admonition and is banished from the Lord's Supper. She becomes Rembrandt's common law wife. We witness the home birth of Cornelia and observe Hendrickje breastfeeding her. She watches Rembrandt and his pupils at work in the evil smelling studio where his assistants boil rabbit skins to make glue for the paints. Hendrickje composes medications she has learnt about  from a midwife in her home town of Bradevoort, but she cannot cure the plague. A comet streaks across the sky to announce an outbreak in Amsterdam. Rembrandt goes bankrupt, and Hendrickje feels Rembrandt's tears on her face as she suffers a horrific death from plague, clinically rendered by the author.

View full annotation

Summary:

One of Steinbeck's earliest published works, The Pastures of Heaven is a collection of stories about the inhabitants of a fertile valley in California, beginning with the Spanish corporal who first stumbles across the "long valley floored with green pasturage on which a herd of deer browsed" and concluding with the families living there during the first stages of the great depression.  Most of the stories take place in 1928-1929, although many are rooted in flashbacks and narratives that span the generations before.  

The novel consists of short stories that describe particular times and places within the valley, and collectively form multiple different perspectives on life there; they are linked by the valley but also by the relationships between the families, and in particular, the Munroes, whose pleasant, mild appearance in almost every story heralds disaster.

View full annotation

Summary:

Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) is an unsuccessful writer, receiving only a slew of rejections with every new novel he sends out.  He teaches poetry to a small class of uninspired students (who try to use song lyrics they think he won't recognise in place of their own homework), and the principal is threatening to end the class.  In addition, he is in a relationship with the art teacher (Alexie Gilmore) who has also caught the eye of a charismatic young writer and fellow teacher (Henry Simmons) who just published his first story in the New Yorker.  Most disconcerting of all, his son (Daryl Sabara) is an unpopular, crude, lascivious teenager who seems to take little pleasure in being rude and mean to other people, but less pleasure in anything else.  Except, perhaps, masturbation and auto-erotic asphyxiation.

View full annotation

Summary:

At fourteen, after marginally consensual sex with a boyfriend, Jane has a baby.  She managed to keep her pregnancy a well-camouflaged secret until late in the process; both family and friends are still reeling from her late-breaking news.  Her mother has died; her grandmother has moved from the tribal reservation to live with Jane, her father (a white Canadian), and Jane's two brothers.  Though the school she attends has daycare for students' babies, Jane finds little emotional support, even among former friends, until a new girl, Dawna, takes an active, unpretentious interest in both Jane and the baby.

With Dawna's and her grandmother's help Jane decides to make the rather complicated arrangements required to allow her to audition for the school play and pursue a longstanding dream of singing and dancing on stage.  She meets with fierce and aggressive competition from a much more privileged girl who does her best to discredit Jane's efforts on account of her unfitness as both a Native American who doesn't look the part, and as an unwed mother who, as one faculty member puts it, shouldn't "parade herself" in public.  Nevertheless, Jane's skill and determination and soul-searching pay off; despite the steep learning curve required to care for a baby and the psychological cost of teen motherhood, she succeeds in making the accommodations and compromises necessary to retrieve old dreams on new terms.

            

View full annotation

Summary:

Until their father abandoned the family and moved to California, Toby Malone, his older brother, Jake, and his younger brother Eli have a close, easy relationship with each other and their parents.  After his departure, and their move into a small condo, Jake begins to associate with drug users and dealers.  He becomes secretive, his behavior becomes erratic, and Toby, from whose point of view the story is told, is torn between loyalty to Jake and guilt at keeping secrets from his mother, who, coping with her own losses, is preoccupied and somewhat depressed.

For a while Toby runs interference, finding ways to care for his younger brother, mask the trouble from his mother, and cover Jake's tracks.  His own stability is preserved in part by a comfortable, cordial relationship with an older man in whose store he helps, and who helps him find baseball cards he treasures.  Finally, when Jake is apprehended and sentenced to rehab, Toby is relieved of his conflict and able to enter into a more authentic relationship with all his family members.  This new stage includes releasing pointless fantasies about his father's coming back and rescuing the family from their troubles.

View full annotation

Summary:

Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Tokyo City Hall bureaucrat near retirement, discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. Reflecting on his life, he finds that it has been empty, that he has not really lived. He devotes the time he has left to modestly exploring the possibilities of living. In a final effort to give his life meaning, he forces a reluctant bureaucracy to turn a badly drained neighborhood area into a park for children.

View full annotation

Summary:

On February 16, 2003, readers of The New York Times Magazine came upon Harriet McBryde Johnson's cover story, "Unspeakable Conversations," and a remarkable image of her gazing directly at those readers from her power wheelchair.  Her story memorably recounts her uncompromising, yet civil disagreements with Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer about nothing less than the value of her life.  That narrative essay is one of eleven stories published in Too Late to Die Young.

They make the case that philosophers and others have incorrectly imagined Johnson's life, and the lives of others with chronic and disabling conditions, as burdensome and not worth living.  Born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease, Johnson grew up in a family that appreciated her; she practiced law in her native Charleston, South Carolina, and became nationally known for her disability activism.  Still, she encountered a world filled with people who feared her condition.  Fear, she found, led them to assume that disability inevitably brings suffering and to use that assumption to justify acts that would prevent her birth.

Her stories, conversationally and often humorously, ask readers to question why they burden some people with calls to justify their lives or to assure the world that they experience pleasure.  Each story recounts an episode that reveals the pleasures Johnson experienced as an active agent in the world.  She ran for a county office, represented her state at a Democratic National Convention, stood her ground for free speech and against Secret Service tactics when President Reagan spoke at her law school, protested Labor Day Week-end telethons, traveled to Cuba to cover a disability conference for a magazine, advocated for clients in employment discrimination cases, and made many, many friends.

Feeling exhilarated rather than confined by her wheelchair, she bears witness, perhaps unexpectedly, to another pleasure:  "the simple delight of movement."  She writes of maneuvering around Charleston, "I zoom through chaotic swarms of tourists, zip around the raggedy sidewalks . . . loop around every inconveniently placed garbage can, with maximum speed and also with style and grace" (252).  But her stories also describe her wheelchair stumbling over incompatible surfaces, one of which sends her to an emergency room far from home.  This episode also brings moments of grace, this time with the ER staff.  After learning who she is, they Google her on-line profiles and writings.  Delighting in their patient with unpredictable needs, they place print-outs of her electronic portfolio in her chart.

View full annotation