Customer Reviews

I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me: A Memoir

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Outspoken New York newspaper columnist and author Breslin, famed for his sharp eye and wit, explores his own brain in this memoir of his life and his experience with brain surgery.

The book opens the night before his aneurysm surgery in 1994 and closes with him leaving the hospital, mind intact. In between is a free-association of flashbacks - a rollicking ride through his life, his city and his work - punctuated by contemplative reflections on the nature of God and the human mind.

"I lived in the everyday excitement of meeting strangers who unfold in front of you and become people you cannot wait to tell others about. How can you be expected to notice what is happening to your own life? ...and suddenly I look down and see that my feet are pawing strange dirt at the lip of a grave that maybe could be mine. And that is blinding speed."

At age 65 Breslin made a rare doctor's visit due to eye trouble. The eye is nothing, but the attendant MRI shows an entirely unrelated "bulge," which could be a life-threatening aneurysm.

Instantly Breslin recalls the Crown Heights riot after a black child was killed by a car driven by a Jew and a Jewish student was subsequently stabbed. Entering the area in a cab, Breslin was beaten and finally rescued. "The guy with the knife took me by the arm and led me through the crowd. The rest of me was reeling, a flag blowing in a stiff wind."

Breslin's eye was injured in the melee and he seizes on this as an explanation. His memory of the riot is pungent, urgent, but the doctor brushes it off.
The aneurysm confirmed, Breslin makes a joke. The doctor is amazed at his lack of understanding. But: "I also was treating it just as I do any horrible thing that occurs in a day. I report on a tragedy by remaining cold and callous and concentrate on making notes of the smallest details. In the hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, I counted Sirhan Sirhan kicking his legs five times before somebody sat on them after he shot Robert Kennedy."

As he educates himself about the aneurysm and his options, he recalls the deaths of others - Nelson Rockefeller, his beloved wife Rosemary, the New York stabbing of Martin Luther King and his assassination a decade later - and endures the kindness and shocking insensitivity of various friends and colleagues.

He recalls colorful characters from mob bosses to shady polls, rollicking nights in bars where he learned more than any journalism graduate sitting at a computer (he has the older generation's contempt for new ways).

He remembers the cold dread of being broke, the bitterness of his childhood, his own floundering lack of identity - always pretending to be someone else. And all of it in vivid anecdotes that rivet the reader to the page.

In contemplative moments he explores his relationship with God and the Catholic Church and researches the science of the mind, discovering that there isn't one.

And he name-drops a bit. Governor Mario Cuomo asks the state health commissioner to recommend a doctor for his case. On the other hand murderer David Berkowitz, "Son of Sam," once pointed him out, saying " 'That's Jimmy Breslin. He's a very good friend of mine.' "

Vintage Breslin, this is a compulsive page turner; funny, poignant and opinionated. His colorful, rushing style is quintessential New York and uniquely Breslin's.

I became interested in Breslin's book because a good friend passed away this year from a brain aneurysm. My friend did not know he had one and did not know what hit him when it burst. Breslin was lucky. He had symptoms, had it diagnosed, did his homework, and went to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. There he was operated on by Dr. Spetzler, one of the world's greatest neurosurgeons.

Jimmy's life flashes by throughout the book and we meet a lot of the characters he has been acquainted with. But the focus of the book is the anatomical anomaly known as an aneurysm.

Jimmy takes us inside the O.R. and we can almost see the great Spetzler as he delicately clamps off the bulging blood vessel in Breslin's brain, a brain which has given us over 40 years of wonderful writing and humor, no matter what you think of his politics.

My friend was not lucky, but Jimmy was and so are we all to have him around for awhile.

"You take emotions, curiosity, whim, wandering around, out of a day's work and you have a corporation of zombies giving you an array of facts and details not worth space in a waste-basket." writes Jimmy Breslin of many of his fellow journalists. No commercials in Jimmy Breslin's prose, just gusty gutsy sentences, long crescendos, reflective adagios, and many many characters, all of them greater than life.

This is a book of reminiscences first and foremost - thirty years of roaming New York's (and the world's) back streets like a mongrel journalist dog, sniffing garbage, following up on a scent, and peeing at lampposts to mark the most extraordinary territory on earth. Never awed, never condescending, Breslin is simply and unwaveringly curious - hence masterly.

In the second part of the book this curiosity takes him into the OR and over the medical logs unflinchingly to understand the brain surgery he underwent, and to report on it. I'm not sure he fully succeeds in weaving it all into a story, though. It is like passengers watching on the TV screen the plane as it takes off - instant replay, and a bit unreal, or a gimmick. So what, it remains a great read.

I love the Breslin delivery. This took us through his surgery deep into his brain, outlined every moment and procedure. Tells us that he didn't want to be "selected" as if he, in his fame, was getting special treatment. Was not at all sure he would come out knowing himself or anything of his universe. Fascinating in the telling. Well done and of major interest to anyone who wonders about the potential in their own life for 'something' to go wrong up there...

Jimmy Breslin found out, almost by accident that he had a life threatening brain aneurism requiring surgery. This memoir weaves the present with his past and reveals the poor Jimmy Breslin, the struggling kid, before he was New York's most well known columnist. Jimmy the man is funny, grouchy, affectionate and profoundly moral and honest. He embraces his life and the luck he has enjoyed, even as he faced personal tragedy and sickness.

Although the memoir is primarily the story of Mr. Breslin's diagnosis and treatment for a serious medical condition, it is delightfully sprinkled with anecdotes that pop into his head as he's contemplating his own fate. It is these stories that make this book well worth the reading. I only wish that Mr. Breslin had been more willing to let down his guard so we could get a better glimpse of the man -- I'm certain that he's at least as interesting himself as are the stories he tells about others.

Jimmy Breslin was this close to joining Hemingway, Runyon, Joyce and Behan at that bar up there in the sky. He faces the very real possibility of death with a calmness that even surprises himself. From this calm he is able to reflect on his life: not a small task. This Pulitzer Prize winner regales us with reminiscences of his front row seat at the most delightful and dreadful events of the last 40-odd years. I read all that he has done. This is his best! God saved Breslin. He still has his talent, call it a miracle, and he still plys the trade. Which makes me think he did the rest of us the bigger favor.

Well, Jimmy Breslin is Jimmy Breslin. I have always been a fan. The part of this book that really fascinated me was his reaction to the health care issue.
He had a brain aneurysm. He has to have it operated or he dies. He could come out of the operation a vegetable. He tells his wife to get everything out of his name - the home the assets everything. Basically he says; I didn't work this hard all my life to spend my last days as a vegetable and have all my money drained into the coffers of doctors and hospitals.
His wife did not follow his advice and luckily he came out all right.
But isn't that interesting? Jimmy Breslin is a millionaire and with a ton of insurance but yet even he is vulnerable to the perils of this health care system.
I guess since I'm 65 myself now and everybody I know is dead or on their way out - the death deal and everybody philosophizing about it is like water under a bridge. The insurance thing was more important to be. I agree with Jimmy, people all work too hard in this country to have whatever they have left stolen from their children and grandchildren to go into paying for this damn defunct health care baloney.
I say good for him!

Richard Edward Noble - The Hobo Philosopher - Author of:

"A Summer with Charlie"