No comments about A Humble Tale.

1 comments about Journey to Justice: A Woman's True Story of Breast Cancer and Medical Malpractice.

1. This is a valuable book for anyone who is personally involved, or knows someone who is involved battling breast cancer. This woman was mis-diagnosed and fought thru the courtroom and chemo-room to save her life. I've talked with her and she takes Tamoxifin daily and has been living every moment for the past thirteen years!

No comments about The Life of a Real Girl: A True Story.

2 comments about Come Take A Walk With Me.

1. Brent Watson has been an inspriation from the first time I met him. His love for life, family and friends encouraged me during hard times in my own life. In this book he tells of the people and trials in life that has made him who he is today. It is a story that makes the reader wonder how he kept going. Once you pick up this book it is hard to set it back down. It is written in such a way that a novice to advanced reader can enjoy it. Any reader will be blessed to get a glimpse in the life of an amazing guy with a heartfelt story to tell.



2. Knowing the author on a personal basis made this book an even more interesting read. The amazing structure of a family filled with love and yet smiling through the hard times is truly a tribute to the amazing strength of faith! I hate that I never had the chance to meet Michael, but the Lord blessed me more than anyone will ever know by allowing me to know Brent. There is so much power and strength in his smile that you have to smile back and realize that life really isn't that bad. Even though some of the stories were familiar, I still couldn't put this book down. Congratulations Brent, it's time you shared yourself with the rest of the world!!!!

No comments about The Story of My Life (Library Edition).

5 comments about A Book of Reasons.

1. In The Age of Grief the writer Jane Smiley refers to that moment when "the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down." A similar dawning pervades John Vernon's autobiographical A Book of Reasons. When his older brother Paul dies of an aneurysm, Vernon finds himself saddled with the responsibility of his sibling's estate. He must rehabilitate a house crammed with refuse and the sickening stench of dead pets and their sickening stench, as he tries to comprehend how Paul's life devolved into dilapidation.
   
   Vernon quests for reasons: how could a man perceived as an eccentric sociopath at most, fall to a state that could only be described as animalistic? Though the book's time frame is the three-month period between Paul's death and the dissolution of his estate, the author manages an exhumation of some 40-odd years in a struggle to reconstruct their lives together and apart.
   
   As the author contends with his grief and the practical aspects of the house's cleanup, he finds a coping mechanism: a consideration of items and commonplace occurrences. Buying a thermometer at Wal-Mart conjures a lengthy discourse on the history of temperature measurement. The purchase of equipment needed to build a simple set of stairs fuels a meditation on tools and how their evolution paralleled that of man and animals. Vernon reaches back through the ages to expound on how the contributions of Galileo, Pascal, Robert Fludd and many others shaped our understanding of how the present world came to be. The reader is treated to various insights ranging from how rocks were employed as hammers by Homo sapiens, to the murder of Abel by Cain with a weapon, or "tools that got to be weapons by being misused."
   
   It's a seesaw, really: over here, the life of Paul alongside the author's guilt, incredulity and dormant memory; over there, a timeless world with its theories, speculations and advances. Both carry a long circuitous chain of reasons or "recipes for making sense of the world's arrangements and accidents."
   
   The bulk of the work is unapologetically nonlinear, containing a larger ratio of science to actual memoir. Yet the author's brother is always there, haunting either a discourse on the history of internment or the origin of central heating back in 80 B.C. For readers who prefer straightforward memoir, these flights may prove a distraction from what is essentially a compelling look at sibling estrangement. But these technical flights never feel clinical or even detached. Vernon's wounded, probing voice holds it together nicely, whether the subject is the Big Bang, or the circumstances that led to the appearance of nine-year-old Paul's photo on the front page of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.
   In melding science to the personal, he illuminates a universe that's become as vague to us as his brother was to him, while reminding us that context is everything. At one point Vernon says that he somehow fell asleep while the brother's life plummeted, an observation that might parallel our relation to the world. Everything is moving too fast goes the song; Vernon's insistence on examining the implications of the everyday is an invitation to cease all our taking for granted.
   
   Vernon entreats us with trenchant description and the use of metaphor. He describes the ritual of bathing after Paul: "This is how I cleaned myself: by lowering my body into Paul's gray opacity rimmed with a sort of soapy pond scum." The automobile looms as a vehicle of escape from the grief that the house represents, but also the seat of memory and revelation: an incident in their teens where he and Paul are humiliated by an aggressive motorist parallels the author's recent discovery of Paul's Duke Ellington CDs under the passenger seat.
   
   At one point, Vernon asks, "Was his life a waste of life?" Paul's obsession with pornography, his ham radio and the Internet were "amusements...of solitude and boredom." His preoccupations with instruments of communication are symbolic of a desperate man pining for an elusive acceptance. As Paul sits glued to the computer in pathetic self-exile, Vernon makes ineffectual stabs at conversation: "He looked up only if I stood in the doorway, and eventually I did--out of fraternal duty or to torture us both, I'm not sure which."
   
   And there lies regret: ultimately, Reasons is atonement for a missed opportunity, though its lack of resolution leaves not solace, but an aching sadness. Paul's disintegration becomes one more mystery of life that Vernon, unlike the intrepid Robert Fludd or Jane Goodall, can't crack. In resigning himself, Vernon tellingly muses that "to be fully conscious of everything, of course, from the rivers of microorganisms we breathe in and out to the history of the shoehorn, would be a form of insanity." That statement's lesson - that the world and our loved ones occasionally escape our grasp - strikes to the heart of this work's disquieting power.



2. Since we live in a democracy, readers like Jude Schmidt of Rockton, Illinois, USA, are free to share their views on literature with one and all. I'll try to be charitable and say he's simply the wrong reader for this book. Unfortunately, though, anyone coming to have a look A Book of Reasons will be tainted by his misinformation. As a writer friend of mine says, "You get a terrific review in the Times and it seems to disappear overnight, but some dim bulb writes in to Amazon and the comments stay forever and a day."

   The fact is, John Vernon's, A Book of Reasons is a lovely and penetrating work. It doesn't easily fall into a genre-except perhaps personal essay or meditation. A few of the other reviewers below describe it well, so I'll simply add that it's constantly surprising, luminous in its sentence craft, informed by a close reading of dozens of other texts-history, biology, cosmology, poetry (his fascinating list of "works consulted" runs to twelve pages). And he avoids the easy pieties that often creep into memoirs. I'm enriched for having spent time with Vernon's mind and heart.

   I ran into this book totally by accident-it was adjacent to something I was looking for in the Tacoma Public Library. Schmidt notes that he had a hard time finding it at major bookstores and department stores-but think of what he could find there, all the hot sellers, and the books that are just like all the other books. I want to weep when I think of the beautiful and different works like Vernon's that fall through the cracks. Whoever reads this review, take a chance on A Book of Reasons, and beyond that, challenge yourself to find others like it-books that don't fit the mold, that are written with great intelligence and a passionate concern for the power of language.




3. The writer attempts to explain if his brother's life was worth living because he ended it so badly. He never answers some basic questions such as "Why did his brother only live with his grandmother" and "what made him so distant to his family". Why the writer chooses to go into such length about the history of the thermometer and the cosmos is beyond me. This book was chosen for my bookclub because of the previous comments and star rating. It should have been a hint to me how bad the book was when no library carried it, and I tried 2 major bookstores plus 3 department store and could only get this book by ordering it. Buy this book if you have trouble sleeping because out of 5 members of my club I was the only one who finished it and it took me forever!



4. The cover illustration of one of Joseph Cornell's cryptic boxes, assembled from discarded junk, is an excellent visual metaphor for the way in which John Vernon approaches the topic of death, loss and an exploration of the reasons for living in this book. Vernon attempts to make sense, not so much of the death, but of the peculiar, eclectic life of his older brother. The binding threads among the disparate elements of Vernon's university career, his role as executor of his brother's estate, the brother's gradual withdrawal from social relationships and the junkpile life that he leaves behind, are brief excerpts from an old encyclopedia that describe the tools and techniques of empirical culture. Vernon profoundly explores the microcosm of American family and lifestyle in his examination of the microcosm of his brother's life and their disconnected and blundered relationship. From the opening pages of his excursion to the local Walmart to find a thermometer to mount on his recently dead brother's house, Vernon is adept at using his own frustration and experiences of cultural clutter as the divining rod to unravel the peculiarities of brother's secluded and repulsively littered life. Vernon uses metaphors like the thermometer throughout the text to observe and measure his own as well as our cultural climate and the ways in which we collect and treat objects and relationships in our supposedly educated and modern American culture. Vernon employs a masterful mix of humor, angst, revulsion, annoyance and fascinated curiousity in his exploration of grieving as a means to examine the many-layered questions of life and death. It is a refreshing exploration that avoids the usual religious and spiritual overtones of the subject, yet retains a profound metaphysical inquiry about self, other and culture that presses the reader to frame (and reframe) his/her own perspective and practices. Vernon uses metaphor and object representation as tools to explore the essential questions and impacts of life and lifestyle. If there is one flaw in this fascinating and engaging book it is the ending, which slips into a conventional approach that pushes the reader to accept the notion that no life is a waste. When Vernon takes us into mundane territory in such an unconventional way it is a bit disappointing that he ends on such a conventional note.



5. John Vernon has the task of cleaning out his brother's house after his brother dies of a sudden illness. He discovers that his brother lived in an abyss of hopelessness and depression. This book is his attempt to come to terms with that discovery, and the questions of personal responsibility it raises for him. Should he have known how his brother was suffering? Could he have helped? Was he required to?

   In the beginning Vernon tries to approach these daunting questions in a light-hearted search for the reasons. Why the thermometer, for instance? His musings along these lines are quite interesting. He meanders through all sorts of unrelated arcane lore looking for connections, for the reasons why things happen the way they do. Ultimately, however, he has to acknowledge that all of these reasons are beside the point. He says, finally, "Reasons do have a limit. Shall I offer a history of the Pepsi bottle, the cigarette, the milk carton, the rag? A history of bad smells? Even now, in memory, I feel buried like Paul, trapped in his house, surrounded by the waste of unexplained things."

   This might have been a turning point in the narrative away from reasons to the limits of personal responsibility, but the author doesn't go there. He seems to withdraw into a kind of personal disgust that pushes away the responsibilities of love and kinship. He does not come to terms with his discovery, and this is the drama of the narrative. As this drama unfolds, however, I sense that it is no longer under Vernon's control. Vernon seems to drift to a place outside of human relationships, so that the book ends on a strange unresolved note.

No comments about The Story Of My Life And Optimism (Kessinger Publishing's Rare Reprints).

1 comments about Wards of the Court.

1. Having known all of these young men from 'next door', it always puzzled me why they disaapeared so suddenly from my life. To realize 40 years later the unspeakable acts of terror they faced is gut-wrenching. The suffering that Kenny, Ivan, Gerald, Steve and Clint endured is beyond comprehension, and to bear it to the world deserves a medal. No movie could do it justice, but it's a truth long overdue so that America faces itself.

5 comments about Gibberish.

1. I have to say being the daughter of a Bipolar mother this book put alot in to perspective! It answered questions, and gave me new questions to ask. It was wonderful to read an actual account instead of of the books I have looked through that are all about the medical side and medications. I felt like I was brought into Scott's world. His private thoughts, demons, and wellness. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know what it is like to live with such an uncertain illness!



2. A true-life account of one man's desperate struggle to defy all odds armed only with the shear power of his will to survive.



3. A true-life account of one man's desperate struggle to defy all odds armed only with the shear power of his will to survive.



4. What an incredibly inspirational read. Never have I picked up a book and not have been able to put it down. I was blown away by the adversity of this man's life struggle. No matter how many times he was knocked down, he would rise again and again to face his next challenge. He would ultimately gain the power and wisdom to endure and above all appreciate and love the miracle of his own blessed life. A mandatory WAKE-UP CALL for teens and adults. Reality is knocking...its time to answer the door!!!



5. What an incredibly inspirational read. Never have I picked up a book and not have been able to put it down. I was blown away by the adversity of this man's life struggle. No matter how many times he was knocked down, he would rise again and again to face his next challenge. He would ultimately gain the power and wisdom to endure and above all appreciate and love the miracle of his own blessed life. A mandatory WAKE-UP CALL for teens and adults. Reality is knocking...its time to answer the door!!!

1 comments about The Angel Wore White Sneakers.

1. This is a fabulous account of one family's life and how it was changed by having a disabled child. It talks about a number of issues including struggling with getting the right education, medical problems, facing up to public ridicule, family relations, and ultimately dealing with untimely death and it repercussions. I would recommend this to any family with a disabled child, or anyone looking for a pick me up.