Looking For A Better Spinal Cord Injury Memoir
341978
This book was required reading in a class for my occupational therapy graduate studies program.  The intention behind the assigned reading was to familiarize ourselves with and better empathize with someone's struggles after a severe spinal cord injury.  Unfortunately, Mr. Reeve's writing made it very difficult for me to empathize with his challenges. There are probably a thousand people waiting to condemn me to hell for saying so, but there it is.

Hopefully, other thoughtful reviewers will allow me to praise Reeves' acting career, his many achievements and his work on behalf of spinal injury research and still provide thoughtful, impersonal criticism of his book without making me out to be some kind of monster.

While it is apparent that Reeves suffered a great deal as a result of the accident, we don't hear much about that in the book.  Instead, he chooses to focus on the trappings of his upper-upper class lifestyle, his yachts, airplanes and horses.  Clearly, these things are meaningful to him, and I appreciate that, but I would have better appreciated more open discussion about his injury, and how his life was altered as a result of it.  Based on what my profession has shown me regarding the enormous expense of this injury, I can say that Reeves was a highly atypical SCI survivor.  Many SCI survivors struggle with the financial cost of care, and with obtaining the right adaptive equipment to makes their lives easier.  I would like to hear one of their stories.

Christopher Reeves provided a beacon of hope to many people suffering from spinal cord injuries, may he rest in peace.
1487479
This book recounts Dr. Alexander's near death experience.  It initially seemed more autobiographical than anything else, and I wished the author would have dedicated more pages to what he saw and felt when out of body. But it is conceivable that those impressions, feelings and memories are irreducible into ordinary language.  In the final chapters, Dr Alexander attempts to hang a scientific moniker on his NDE but really can't.  I WANT TO BELIEVE THIS
2241838
The current book reviews of BNB are getting more and more interesting. Defenders of BNB basically have no evidence to back up their words. All they say is that a memoir, unlike biography, does not need to be fact-based. I think they need to know that both biography and memoir are historical accounts of a person's life---facts, not fabricated account of a person's life.

Liangfu Wu is writing a book. If it is evidence based, I support the efforts 100%!

http://www.amazon.com/Planning-Review-Book-Break-Preface/forum/Fx1M49LYP8YZYQ4/Tx1RATTK02STEDW/1/ref=cm_cd_dp_tp_dolp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=1591845521

The preface can be found there. But, I think the Preface reads a little too scholarly!

Liangfu Wu says: "I will cover the cost to publish the book. All proceeds, if any, will go to American Heart Association. I like AHA because I just received First Aid, CPR and AED training from them". But I strongly recommend the profit of the book should go to American Red Cross, which cover whole world, not just USA. Since the truth-seekers may be all over the world, the book should get support from more people.

I like to know how to publish the book, via  Google, Apple,  Amazon or Print?

BTW, I am just curious about Mr. Wu's father and Googled Zi-Dan Wu, I found this here, just in case somebody has questions
[...]
326597
Although I could understand the methodoligy in writing this book I found it too disconcerting when trying to tie the story together.  This is probably because of a TBI (brain injury).
3500478
This book does a good job telling ten anecdotes of people who were stricken with heart failure.  Then it explains, in a way very light on details, what was going on.  This is probably good for people who like stories.  If you're a techie, the personal anecdotes are tiresome.

For this book to be useful, it should go over how normal heart function works, electrically and mechanically.  It should explain how a decrease in heart function can affect the rest of the body and why.  Then it should discuss the failure modes that cause a decrease.  With each failure mode, it should discuss possible interventions.

Armed with this info, a patient and family could made sense out of test results and proposed interventions.  The patient could judge how he's feeling against what the interventions are supposed to be doing.

Instead it's a lot of anecdotes.  One of the cases involved someone with severe heart failure that looked hopeless.  They flew him from a city hospital to the *Cleveland Clinic*, where the author is a Medical Director, and they performed advanced interventions that saved his life.  A year later, his heart failure was in remission and he was doing great.  They didn't go into details about the interventions, but clearly the author is promoting his own hospital.  I don't mind their self-promotion, but it needs to be backed up with hard science.

The stories really are surprising.  People with no history of health problems in their 40s or younger sometimes suddenly get heart problems.  There are medical interventions, some developed in the past 15 years, to help them.  They never expected this to happen to them.  It makes you think how this could happen to anyone.

If you want the science and nuts-and-bolts, though, you need to look elsewhere.  Historians say the mechanistic view of biology took hold after William Harvey described the circulation of the blood.  The heart is so much like a simple human-made machine, that this organ ushered in a mechanistic view of life.  The topic cries out for an engineering approach.  The book doesn't deliver.
1069935
The book is marvelous for what it is, but a bit disappointing for what it is not. It was never meant to be a history of Vietnam, the battle history of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, or even a personal history of Henry Enoch's time in Vietnam. This book is more of a filtered memoir, sharing some of his thoughts and experiences while on a one year tour of duty. The book is not a very intimate look, except by accident.

---The Good Stuff---

* Enoch is college educated, and writes well. I ended up reading the book in one day, and it kept my interest and attention.

* While there are no scandalous tell-all sections relating never before heard stories, there are some very interesting details, related almost matter-of-factly. For example, Enoch tells us that he is in country for several months before he even finds out where he is. And even then, he only finds out the name of the province-he still really has no idea of where exactly that province is. While this may exaggerate the point a bit, there has probably been no other American war where its troops didn't know where they were. To me, this spoke volumes.

* Similarly, Enoch spends much of the book relating very boring and mundane details of his existence. I know more about his diet and snack food habits than I do my own. And yet this is, to me, telling. Enoch was a grad student in Chemistry, and now his world revolves around his supply of Twinkies. No thoughts of battle strategy, no interest in how to better defeat the NVA-his brainpower is tied up with cookies. Not to criticize the author, but again, to me this speaks volumes.

* In the year that he is in country, you can almost feel his motivation and attitude collapse. The patrols get a little more relaxed; less attention to detail on guard duty; in short-a soldier who doesn't want to be there. His attention is far more riveted on personal comfort than any liberating of any country. Seems a remarkable contrast to WWII, which was only 20 years prior.

---The Not So Good Stuff---

* The descriptions of the author's day to day existence can get a bit boring. It seems that over half the words in the book describe meals, and three quarters describe basic creature comforts. While I think it makes an excellent point, as described above, it gets tedious.

* You won't learn anything about the war itself. Enoch never relates any details of anything that happened at a higher level than what happened to him and his five buddies.

---Overall---

It is certainly not the best book you will ever read about Vietnam, but it does provide a very realistic look at what was important to the grunts actually fighting the war. There was no fanatic patriotism, no sense of liberating the cities of Europe, no thought of strategy or tactics...just counting the days to "get back to the world." In a way, that probably says more about the war than anything else.

Since the book is relatively inexpensive, and a very quick read, I would say it is worth spending an afternoon or two to get an appreciation of the war through Sgt. Enoch's eyes.
2696194
I am very anxious to read this to my daughter, who suffered a brain injury in a horse back riding accident in 2006.
Excited to skim through the pages, I was surprised and disappointed to see the size and contrast of the print.  It is rather small and  light.  Persons with brain injuries often have reading challenges, and this print is difficult for me.  I will probably use a magnifying glass to read it.
I hope the publisher does another printing with larger bolder type. I would like an audio version also.
I only put the three star rating because a star was required to submit.  Will post again after we read the book.
1008381
Okay, she's not THAT bad a writer. She did, after all,  study English Lit at university. In this book she  tosses off an occasional reference or quotation by Shakespeare, Kipling, Keats et al.
I'm a big fan of medical memoirs and though this isn't the smoothest read it does have interesting insights (balancing detachment and caring), funny moments (conversation with ER nurse on being called a c*&t), and heartbreaking moments (the story of Mr Cooke, who had to be rushed into surgery because of an aortic aneurysm as he physically fought against restraining him, roaring and sobbing). She can write meticulously about events, if you want just read the eleven pages she wrote about a tonsillectomy she performed! I thought I had a strong stomach, but it wasn't apparent during these pages. I would recommend this book to others who enjoy medical memoirs with the caveat that it's not the most riveting or insightful one ever written. She sometimes does write like an old English novel: "I looked down, seeking another place for my gaze to rest, perhaps on some anodyne words written by a GP. What I saw instead was a trebling of the young man's  image whose composure had so discomposed me, a triptych of him, an Aidan triumvirate."
2540036
Author's husband Rich Rogin suffers a permanent brain injury after being hit by a car trying to rescue their dog.  The book puts the reader in her mind as she details how she lives her life with her new "institutionalized" husband while living with their old memories.  Her memoir is beautifully written...austere and direct like Cormac McCarthy (The Road)...engaging like Richard Power's fantastic book The Echo Maker (also about brain injury) and far less stuffy, less "blue-blooded" and less pompous than "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion.
3181532
This is an aresome memoir of David's life as a quadriplegic. It tells about an array of challenging ordeals, he has encountered over his life. He persevered when the road, at times was rough. I am also a quadriplegic of 34 years, and I can truly testify as to what he had to go through.
Good luck in all your endeavors which you wish to pursue.
May God bless you.

Dorothy Alford
1043451
I once read that a good memoir requires either a writer with an exceptional life or a writer with exceptional literary skills. Blackout Girl, in my opinion, offers up neither. The events recounted by author, Storm, are likely shared by many of her readers. However, there is a lack of reflection in her book, which makes Storm seem self indulgent rather than insightful.
3271142
"Coping with Physical Loss and Disability" by Rick Ritter, MSW, is a jarring book at 92 pages.  When I first got it, I thought it would be a regular self-help book, and I admit I was skeptical.  But I opened it and it turned out to be a workbook.

There are six sections of the book, going from what your original loss was to how you could ask for and get help for it.  In fact, I really had to consider that particular question.  "Describe your loss in detail" was another.  That was one of those where I had to write my feelings, and like many with disabilities I've told the story so many times, I figured I'd gotten it to a science.  It was a blah story with which I started out, therefore; one I'd told a million times.

Then, something happened inside of me.  I got angry.  I don't do that too much; usually I'm at most irritated and that's that.  Life is irritating to me these days for various personal reasons, so that was what the answer was like till that particular switch in my head went off.  All of a sudden, there was a real answer.  I actually started yelling "What?  You want to know about the stupid primary care physician who said one leg was shorter than the other, when it turned out I had a blood clot in it?  You want to know about my parents?  What...?"

In the end, the question tore something out of me that I hadn't expected at all.

If you read this book, be prepared to do it slowly.  At the end, you'll find a section of resources that is very intense.  The author even stuck in movies that deal with disability!  The book itself will take you to places inside that you didn't know existed, like that bit of anger -- believe me, I had more than one of those.  I cried, I threw things, I felt sorry for myself, I sat for long periods of time thinking hard about questions my mind refused to answer but that on the other hand it wanted to.  That test of my own will-power hurt a lot sometimes.  But believe me when I say, it's very much worth it.

"Coping with Physical Loss and Disability:  A Workbook" - Rick Ritter, MSW; LovingHealing Press 2006.
1660518
Her personal, painful history of recovery is one that could have been told more effectively with better editing.  The topic is important for clinicians as well as individual gaining stability from a severe mental illness.  I was disappointed that the writing style kept me at a distance.
849247
I bought the book after reading the wonderful article and had high hopes from this book. I've finished 5 chapters so far and the book seems to be more about authors personal life, which is free and interesting, but not much related to the topic. I was hoping to learn lessons from the dying patients' life rather than from author's life. The story telling is fun but would've rather shared more lessons.
307738
This book came to me via a recommendation from my urologist and physical therapist, neither of who have actually read it. I've been dealing with chronic pain for about 20 years, and in that time, I've done a lot to educate myself. As a result, I already knew much of what I found in the book. If the reader has recently been diagnosed and knows little or nothing about pelvic pain, the book could prove to be insightful.

The first couple of chapters are excellent. Amy Stein does a good job of explaining what pelvic pain is, which conditions make up pelvic pain syndromes, and how the conditions feed off of each other to create even more problems such as shortened muscle structures, spasms, and pain. It all makes sense, and I've never found such a concise yet comprehensive explanation of this type of pain.

I think it's ambitious, though, to say that following the plan in the book will heal pelvic pain. It might diminish the pain and bring some relief, but healing is something else all together. The exercise plan is made up of exercises I have done for many years, and yet, my pain has never improved. The book claims to include nutritional advice, but it is scant information, at best.

Stein's book relies heavily on exercise as the course to healing, but I know many people who have not found relief this way, myself among them. Reading further and doing some calculating, Stein's plan requires the patient to exercise at least 90 minutes a day in order to get in all of the stretching and strengthening exercises, plus an hour of cardio. Frankly, I don't believe that is realistic. Do people with normal lives really have 90 minutes or more for daily exercise, plus an additional 30 minutes or more for meditation? Don't they work or have families?

With the exception of the helpful information in the first two chapters, a lot of the non-exercise related information is very general and superficial in scope. As for the exercise chapters, you could benefit just as much from exercising with a yoga DVD of the gentle/restorative or pregnancy genre.
2978663
I guess it speaks more about me than the author, but I wish there was something that could walk away with some call to action about what can be done. Instead I just felt really hopeless. I guess that is often the Case with TBI, but it was a very rough read. like I said its important to understand the epidemic but none the less I wish there was some sort of positive call to action to help or prevent TBI.
4118959
Whiplash is a basic staple in my profession. It is treated poorly if at all. As for the patient, sometimes cruelly and somewhat inadequately. The forces generated are everything beyond human evolution can handle: Yes we fell off a mammoth or a ledge but there was less social stress, fatigue and kids screaming in the back seat. Or purely there was no way to accelerate and decelerate so instantly and often - when we wrote on the inside of caves.

I have been after a non-technical book on whiplash that would spell it out so honestly, with such readability that it could empathise with a person in pain to the effect of telling it like it is, and what you might do.

Lets face it: most physicians do not understand the intricacies of the pathology when it comes to treating whiplash associated disorders (WAD). No understanding of having your head turned, the foot on the brake or emotionally stressed at the time, the amount of damage, the soft tissue injury nature, etc. And no quick fix. Soft tissue heals SLOWLY.

Kerry Trotter is a very capable writer. In fact, its her story so she knows it well enough. The amount of pain this woman has endured (much additional due to the pathetic lack in our so called 'evidence based' medical system) and that I witnessed upon meeting her is real and plentiful.

The problem is that this book is not about Kerry. Its about thousands of people shunned by a virtually blind health system that will not work together to treat WAD for the benefit of all of us. So it begs the question: what motivates our health professionals... really?