18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heartfelt and informative--and oh how the title fits!, April 21, 2009
This review is from: A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures (Hardcover)
What if your father is Ben Bradlee, your mother's Sally Quinn, and you're stuck with a learning disorder that disrupts even prosaic activities?
Never mind growing up to help expose another Watergate or skewer pretentious socialites. Suppose you have trouble understanding most books or face memory problems.
Just what to do, especially in a brutal, hierarchical place like Washington, D.C.? In politics and media, the generals and their families are expected to put on a good show for the troops. How to respond? Should your family hide you from the public or gloss over your shortcomings?
Luckily the parents of Quinn Bradlee, a plucky 26-year-old born with Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome, let him and a skillful collaborator tell the whole story or at far more than we might have anticipated. Ben Bradlee and wife had apparently envisioned their son writing a buttoned-down book without earthy language--perhaps a respectful look at the boy's ancestors, since Quinn is a genealogy buff. But Quinn and his not-so-hidden ghost wisely avoided this PRish tack.
The two paid due tribute to Bradlee and Quinn forebears, but kept in the S word. In fact, they even wrote a scene set on a Caribbean island, Saint Martin, where Quinn loses his virginity to a hooker with skin "as black as the night sky and black curly hair that came down to her shoulder." Quinn's hooker story would be mere titillation by itself; but A Different Life is full of, say, his reflections on women and life in general--naïve in places, but just the same, genuinely his. He does not just share his triumphs at a boarding school for people with disabilities; he also tells of the vicious hazing there. Honesty is the salient trait of this work. What Quinn's story misses in eloquence at times, he more than makes up in credibility of voice.
Beyond that, Quinn and collaborator skillfully weave into the book insights on VCFS: how to spot it, how to cope with it, how to accept it. At length they quote Dr. Robert Shprintzen, who, besides having helped Quinn, wrote of the first paper to describe the heart-related syndrome, in 1978. Some 150,000 people here in the U.S. suffer from VCFS, which comes with a whole range of mental and physical complications.
Quinn is into film, not traditional journalism; but with the help of his friend, tutor, and ghost, Jeff Himmelman, he appears to have made a solid contribution in the area of health coverage, efforts that go on via a stylish, useful Web site promoted in the book. FriendsOfQuinn.com also educates visitors about other learning disabilities.
A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures, the full title of the book itself, is a clever play on the one for Ben Bradlee's autobiography called
A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. Without meaning to slight the father, may I suggest that to many readers, the son's book may be more memorable? The older Bradlee, born into an aristocratic Boston family, suffered from polio and had his own struggles. But they paled beside those which the young Quinn has faced, does face, and will face. Quinn's biggest challenge, of course, will be his destiny after his parents die. His father is 87; his mother, 68.
The good news for the parents is that the origins of Quinn's disease, while genetic, apparently haven't anything to do their ages at the time of conception. No need for guilt in that respect or probably most others. Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, as stated in the book, never hesitated to spend money on Quinn's tutors and other special advantages; and even more importantly, they gave him time rather than just locking him in an institution as an "expert" had suggested.
Still, is there anything more that the parents can do? Perhaps I've overlooked something; but I can't recall any mention in A Different Life of the role that the right technology might play in truly nudging Quinn into the world of books. Quinn can read out passages from books and is even a fan of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, drawn in by the conversational style, but he generally has trouble processing printed information. Imagine the benefits of text to speech. Has Quinn ever experimented with that capability on a Kindle or other machine?
I'm thinking of a Floridian who--with the help of software that read words aloud to him as they showed up on his laptop computer screen--turned himself from a Wal-Mart clerk into a teacher. I doubt that Quinn could effect a transformation of that magnitude; but tech is worth a try if he and others like him are to learn to enjoy more books. Searching FriendsOfQuinn.com, I didn't find one reference to "e-books" or "ebooks" with sound capabilities in use. If, in fact, nothing is there, perhaps Quinn and his Web community could explore these digital options.
Within the employment area, here's a possibility for Quinn himself although it could apply to others in his situation. Imagine Quinn as a Web usability tester working directly for the Washington Post itself, not just the company that created FriendsOfQuinn.com. If he can cope with a certain kind of interface, there is a good chance that the rest of the world can. Coal mines and canaries and all so on. That's just one tiny example of how people like Quinn can contribute to society and businesses.
Meanwhile bravo to Quinn for a heartfelt and informative book, and to his parents for raising him to make such achievements possible.
David Rothman
Author of The Solomon Scandals
(A Washington newspaper novel)
Editor-publisher, TeleRead.org
(Devoted to e-books and related topics)
Note: Sorry about the length of this review, but I felt that Quinn Bradlee's book was worth it.
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