Review: `Please, let me tell you about my mother, Iris.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 22, 2014
Kurt Sipolski writes a stunning biography of his mother's life and his that is so engaging and warm and full of that healing spirit of love that once read you simply want to keep it handy to read when you think you have some difficult challenges. Sipolski has been a reporter for Rupert Murdoch's Daily Mirror group in Sydney, Australia, and has been in The Desert Sun, Palm Springs Life magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, and he founded and published the San Francisco Gentry magazine. But in addition to his gifts as a reporter and publisher he will now be recognized as a writer cum novelist with this tender and touching memoir to his mother Iris who supported him from age two when he (in the book, his early name of `Gray' is used) was diagnosed with polio in those pre-vaccine days.He opens his book (after a collection of photographs of his family at various stages) with his late mother's youthful leaving Hardscrabble, Illinois for Washington DC in 1940 at age 18, with plans for a major career only to marry her dream soldier who departed for WW II and returning from the war to tragically die leaving the young Iris a widow with two young boys. But here is where the beauty of the story escalates. Through all of Gray's trials that polio brings -with braces, the need of daily exercises, the support of Gray's ego and desire to live a normal life - Iris provides those mother miracles that makes Gray a strong young lad who goes on to become the important figure he achieves.Written with compassion as well as a fine style of prose, Sipolski has created a little book with an aura of illumination that should be read by everyone. This reader would recommend reading the book BEFORE the optioned motion picture is created - the tenderness it brings is something that has been missing from many books for too long a time. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, May 14