John T. Slania

A pivotal moment in Immortal Bird occurs when the protagonist, adolescent Damon Weber, is playing a pick-up game of soccer with his family. After a lengthy scrimmage, his father, author Doron Weber, is ready to call it a day. His son becomes angry. There is a heated exchange, as the young Damon, filled with adrenaline, competiveness and rage, refuses to quit. “Why are we stopping?” Damon asks. “Let’s keep playing. I wanna play!” His father argues, but then gives up, overlooking Damon’s tantrum because the teenager has been through so many medical calamities since his birth, and faces more in the future. “I decide to refrain from further reprimand, because I wish to preserve that spirit,” Weber writes. “Even if it’s misplaced here, this fieriness will serve him well in future contests.”

Weber’s Immortal Bird is a love letter to his son, an account of Damon’s determination to fight a series of medical setbacks while fighting for his life. Damon was born without one of two ventricles that pump blood to and from the heart and lungs. He is missing the ventricle that pumps blood to the lungs to replenish oxygen and discharge carbon dioxide. By age four, Damon had already had two heart operations, the second a “modified Fontan,” which essentially replicates the work of the second ventricle. The surgery allows Damon to lead a relatively normal childhood, although he is smaller than most of his classmates. But he is smart, energetic and proves to be a gifted actor, performing Shakespeare and earning a small part on the HBO Western “Deadwood.”

Damon’s medical maladies are comparatively minor until he is diagnosed with PLE, an affliction related to his Fontan procedure that prevents him from keeping protein in his body. This results in an arduous journey in which Damon experiences many physical and emotional highs and lows, and ultimately, a heart transplant with traumatic side effects.

Immortal Bird is a heart-wrenching family memoir that describes the deep love between parent and child, while also celebrating the nobility and spirit of a boy who embraces life with a fiery passion.

In a literary marketplace flooded with memoirs, I approached the reading of The Memory Palace with apprehension. The title sounds awfully familiar, and the publisher’s press release makes no apologies, announcing that the book follows “in the footsteps of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club.” I took a deep breath and prepared for another harrowing tale of how a mother ruined a daughter’s life.

But I set my skepticism aside after reading the first chapter of The Memory Palace, when I discovered that Mira Bartók’s account of her tortured upbringing by a schizophrenic mother is as compelling as the two best-selling memoirs to which it is compared. The book also boasts a strong storyline and eloquent writing. Bartók hooked me with this early passage: “We children of schizophrenics are the great secret-keepers, the ones who don’t want you to think that anything is wrong.”

Norma Herr is a musical prodigy whose schizophrenia slowly takes control of her life. After she gives birth to two daughters, Mira and Rachel, her husband leaves her. As her illness worsens, Norma struggles to raise her children, and fails. Her head is filled with voices, images of dangerous animals and of alien abductors. She threatens to kill herself, and threatens her daughters, too, should they reveal her terrible secret. She keeps detailed diaries and hoards small knickknacks and mementos.

As she reaches adulthood, Mira Herr is able to escape her mother by moving to another town and becoming Mira Bartók, an accomplished artist and children’s book author. (She makes the painful decision to change her name, taking the last name of Hungarian composer Bela Bartók, in order to avoid poison-pen letters, midnight phone calls and unannounced visits from her deranged mother.) But Bartók’s life takes an ironic twist when, at age 40, she is involved in a car accident that affects her memory. Suddenly, she is fighting to retrieve her memories; like her mother, she is engaged in a battle with her brain. When she later discovers her mother is dying of cancer, Bartók ends her estrangement. Finding her mother’s trove of diaries, letters and the arcane items she had collected, Bartók uses them to construct a “memory palace,” and is able to reconstruct portions of her childhood.

Bartók’s story overcame my memoir phobia with a page-turning plot, sophisticated writing and, as a bonus, vivid illustrations from the author. It does indeed deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, and readers of those memoirs will find The Memory Palace richly rewarding.

The ancient Chinese tradition of foot binding involved using cloth to tightly wrap a young girl’s feet so that they would fit into three-inch slippers, because a Chinese woman’s beauty and stature was measured by the tininess of her feet. The practice would crush the bones at the end of a girl’s feet so that her toes could be bent under her heels. But foot binding was permanently outlawed when Communists took control of China, a fact Dean King (Skeletons on the Zahara) mentions in Unbound because it is symbolic of how, in some small ways, Chinese women were liberated by the Communist revolution.

King’s book tells the story of the women who joined the Red Army—an action revolutionary in itself—and participated in a historic military maneuver that would eventually lead to the Communist takeover of China in 1949. The maneuver, known as the “Long March,” began in October 1934 when the Red Army, surrounded by Chinese Nationalist soldiers, staged a daring retreat that would cover more than 4,000 miles and last over a year. Communist leader Mao Zedong and Nationalist General Chiang Kai-shek are the men most often associated with the Long March. But King chooses to focus on the 30 women who took part in the journey. Among this diverse group was Ma Yixang, 11, a peasant girl sold by her family; Wang Xinlan, 10, who came from wealth; Jin “Ah Jin” Weiying, 30, a college-educated teacher who became active in the Chinese labor movement; and Zhou “Young Orchid” Shaolan, 17, a nurse who refused to be left behind when the army tried to send her home.

King spent five years traveling the length of the Long March, interviewing those women still alive to tell their tales. Theirs are stories of courage, remarkable not only because of the physical and psychological rigors of their journey, but also because of their determination and leadership in a country not known for granting equal rights to women. China has always been a mysterious and secretive empire, but Unbound peels back the curtain to reveal a story of strength and survival.

John T. Slania teaches journalism at Loyola University in Chicago.