Parents of terminally ill children -- Biography. |
Resilience (Personality trait) |
Rapp Black, Emily |
Rapp, Emily |
Human resilience |
Resiliency (Personality trait) |
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Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
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Searching... Bridgewater Public Library | B RAPP BLACK, EMILY | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dighton Public Library | 92 RAP | 1:DIMOD | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... East Bridgewater Public Library | 92 RAPP BLACK, E. 2021 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | B RAPP BLACK | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mattapoisett Free Public Library | B RAPP BLACK 2021 | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Seekonk Public Library | 920 RAPP BLACK | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"[An] often beautiful jewel of a book . . . Black's power as a writer means she can take us with her to places that normally our minds would refuse to go."-- The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Still Point of the Turning World comes an incisive memoir about how she came to question and redefine the concept of resilience after the trauma of her first child's death.
"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life," a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World . Since that time, her life had changed utterly: She left the marriage that fractured under the terrible weight of her son's illness, got remarried to a man who she fell in love with while her son was dying, had a flourishing career, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But she rejected the idea that she was leaving her old life behind--that she had, in the manner of the mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes and been reborn into a new story, when she still carried so much of her old story with her. More to the point, she wanted to carry it with her. Everyone she met told her she was resilient, strong, courageous in ways they didn't think they could be. But what did those words mean, really?
This book is an attempt to unpack the various notions of resilience that we carry as a culture. Drawing on contemporary psychology, neurology, etymology, literature, art, and self-help, Emily Rapp Black shows how we need a more complex understanding of this concept when applied to stories of loss and healing and overcoming the odds, knowing that we may be asked to rebuild and reimagine our lives at any moment, and often when we least expect it. Interwoven with lyrical, unforgettable personal vignettes from her life as a mother, wife, daughter, friend, and teacher, Rapp Black creates a stunning tapestry that is full of wisdom and insight.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rapp Black (The Still Point of the Turning World) shines in this stirring account of life after the death of her son Ronan from Tay-Sachs, a rare and always fatal inherited disorder. In July 2012, with two-year-old Ronan's health in decline, Rapp Black considered suicide, but decided not to go through with her plan upon realizing, "I want to love again, to know hope and happiness." Instead, she carried on and fell in love, remarrying after Ronan's 2013 death and later having a daughter. This experience--being both a new mother and a grieving mother--serves as a springboard for an exploration of the concept of resilience. In one passage, she delves into the meaning of the word (the term made its written debut in 1818, discussing effective methods of shipbuilding), then segues into the meaning in more contemporary use related to courage and personal strength. Rapp Black asserts that, in life, resilience requires no extraordinary measures because life itself--with its inevitable losses--demands resilience for survival. The prose is lyrical and hypnotic but never overwrought or contrived. This is a mesmerizing and unforgettable tale. (Jan.)
Kirkus Review
A meticulous examination of the aftershocks of the loss of a child. Rapp Black begins with a stirring scene: Devastated by her son's terminal illness and failing marriage, she recounts how she stood on a bridge in New Mexico, contemplating throwing herself nearly 600 feet into the river below. Though she walked away, she was far from mental or emotional recovery. In her previous memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, the author tracked her experience during the period after she realized that her son, Ronan, had Tay-Sachs disease, a debilitating genetic disorder that progressively destroys the nervous system. In this follow-up, she describes in wrenching detail his death in 2013, shortly before his third birthday, and her response to that tragedy as well as the painful, "cruel" dissolution of her marriage. Rapp Black soon remarried and had a daughter, Charlie, a year after Ronan's death. The aching conflict she continues to feel about being mother to both a dead child and a living one is central to the story, as is her attempt to refute the many ways her friends and others tried to praise and reassure her for her "resilience" (a word she has "a complicated relationship with") and on her "second chance" or the "resurrection of your life," ideas that frustrate her. "Ronan is gone and Charlie is here," she tells herself, as she tries to adjust to being "not just a bereaved parent, but a bereaved parent with a living child." Not so much a traditional memoir as a series of essays of varying lengths, the book doesn't follow a straightforward narrative arc, as Rapp Black attempts to understand her feelings and irresolvable conflict from multiple angles. She employs a variety of metaphors--dark matter in one chapter, butterflies in another--which may leave some readers impatient even as they clearly delineate her abiding mental state. A searing, uncompromising effort to wrestle with permanent grief. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Within a two-year span, Black (The Still Point of the Turning World, 2014) loses her two-year old son to Tay-Sachs disease, divorces, falls in love, remarries, and gives birth to a healthy baby girl. In this probing memoir, she shares her journey as a mother split in two by the painful past and the joyful present. How does one survive great suffering and go on with the knowledge that everything falls away, that nothing is sure, that there are no do-overs? Rejecting the characterizations of those who tell her she's resilient or who compare her to a mythic phoenix, rising from the ashes, she struggles to a more human-sized answer--people do what they must do--and a more nuanced definition of resilience. It's not simply the current "it" word for strong or tough. A resilient person is one who has flexibility, one who adapts. Comfort comes from her wisdom in perceiving that all the people who came before us--now unseen but with us still--hold us up, supporting us in all that we do.
Library Journal Review
In Blindfold, award-winning journalist Padnos relates what it's like to be kidnapped and tortured in Syria by Al-Qaeda for two years; originally scheduled for July 2020.