My Story, Dave Pelzer tells how he overcame the horrors of his childhood traumas

 This review is of a Sinhala translation of the original book. So I beg your pardon for any possible errors of the names of the characters and places involved.
My story is the self written autobiography of Dave Pelzer. This is a true story of boy who had an abused childhood, suffered from the effects of it for a long time, but gradually gained control over his fate and became a successful citizen.
David Pelzer has a wonderful early childhood. He and his brothers are happy and content with his parents love and caring. But after a while their parents, specially mother, change, though the reason is not clearly mentioned in the book.
Both parents get deeply in to drinking. His father becomes ignorant, and mother becomes cruel to him. She makes him slave at home, beats him, burns him and starves him. But above all, she tells him that he is a bad boy and is the cause of family’s misery.
The true extent of the abuse he undergoes will shock you, if you read the book yourself.
As his school teachers realize that he is being abused by his mother, the social service is notified and he gets taken in to their care. He lives with a few foster families from then on, some of whom truly love him. With their help he shakes his bad memories off. The most important thing is that he realizes that he must break the cycle of hatred, there for his parents.
He works hard at manual jobs and saves enough to get himself in the Air Force in which he eventually comes to a good position with his hard work and devotion. Then the first girlfriend steps in to his life. After they spend some time together, she gets pregnant with his child. In spite of all the advises of his friends against it, he decides to marry her, determined not to let what happened to him as a child to his own child. He becomes the father of son and the son becomes the focus of his life. Remembering how miserable he was as a child, he brings up his son with love and care.
He decides to help those who are like him out there. He starts doing workshops for those who have had abused childhoods. His wife sees all these as nonsense and eventually leaves him. He tries his best not to let the divorce disturb his son.
In spite of these draw backs, he continues his deed. Then he finds the true love of his life. With her help, he fulfills the ultimate need of all human beings, to play an important role in the society. His social work is finally recognized and rewarded. But what’s more important is that he is a good father to his son through and through.
Books like this has the power to help people to be rid of hatred and make them realize how good it is to forgive. This book is one of the best I have ever read.

Cancer Cocaine And Courage, the story of Dr William Hulsted, a noble surgeon

This review is of a Singhalese translation of the original book. So, I beg your pardon for any errors of the names of the places or characters involved.

Cancer, cocaine, and courage, written by Arthur J. Backhard and William D. Crane tells us the story of a man who had a rock-solid determination to help the mankind and did so, showing an incomparable courage facing the tremendous obstacles that came his way.

William Hulsted does his first dissection to a frog, in 1862, when he is a small boy, using his father’s razor blade and a bottle of brandy. He gets caught by his father and is blamed for ‘trying to look inside what God created’. It’s the father’s religious belief that humans have no right to meddle with God’s creations.

But fate brings about incidents that make him determined to become a doctor. Always a clever student, he gets well by his school education and enters a medical college in New York, in spite of his father’s disapproval, whose hope is to pass his business on to his son.

William takes surgery as the area of his specialization. He studies it really hard, focusing his attention particularly on the infections caused by the poor sterilization used back then. A medical scholar in England some others in Germany and Austria try develop that area but are ignored by very conventional practitioners of England and America.

But William is interested, there’s no stopping him. He contacts all those who believe in sterilization, and learns from them, experiments, and establishes what must have been the first systematic sterilization procedure of the surgical practice of America. The hardest part of it is convincing the old-fashioned doctors of the importance of it.

A very creative thinker, Dr. William does the first blood transfusion of the history and the very other day saves his sister’s life with another transfusion. He later performs a surgery on his mother, removing calculi from her gold bladder and saving her life, ultimately making his father realize that God has equipped some of his creations with special skills to help his other creations.

It’s Dr. Williams’s discovery that to cure a cancer surgically, not only the cancer but also the surrounding healthy tissue has to be excised.

A colleague demonstrating the usability of cocaine as an anesthetic brings about an unexpected change in Dr. Williams’s life. After many experiments on cocaine on himself as well as some of his fellow practitioners, he starts using them in surgery. It’s almost too late when the apparently useful anesthetic turns out to be highly addictive, as DR. William starts showing withdrawal symptoms and one of his fellow workers who had volunteered to let cocaine be experimented on him passes away. It’s the beginning of a very distressful period of his life, having to fight off the horrible withdrawal symptoms of the drug. But, a man of fierce courage as he is, he makes it, with the help of his friends. This part of the book shows clearly how awful it is to be hooked up to a drug, and how much social support a drug addict needs to shake off an addiction.

Well, Dr. William Hulsted’s mission continues much further, but I wouldn’t spoil things for you by telling more. Just find the book and read it yourself. You will be glad to read such a good book about such a great person.

Totto Chan, The Little Girl at The Window

Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s self written biography covering her early school years, ‘Totto Chan, The Little Girl at The Window’ is a very interesting, inspiring, and educational read. It tells us her experience as a student in a unique school with a very innovative, practical way of teaching, in Japan during the time of Second World War.

Little Totto Chan doesn’t last for long in her very first school. Her teacher gets frustrated with her behavior. She seems to have some kind of an obsessive compulsion and is distracted from the lesions easily. When the teacher can no longer tolerate it, Totto Chan’s mother is called in, explained how her daughter is ‘not fitting in’. The mother has no option but to withdraw her child from the school. She is worried, not knowing that this is a chance for her daughter to attend an even better school. So, Totto Chan is taken ‘Tomo School’, where she is destined to have such a nice time. She gets her first surprise when the school’s principal, whose idea has given birth to the school, request her in introduce herself to him, telling all she had to tell. Totto Chan is thrilled, for there is a person who is eager to listen to her. She goes on talking, telling about her, about her family, about her pet dog, until she becomes unable to think of anything more to say.

But the surprise doesn’t end there. In Tomo, they don’t have a fixed time table for classes. The students are free to choose the order of the lessons. It is indeed a student centered teaching approach.

Most of the lessons are very practical in Tomo. For example, when the students are learn about farming, they are taken to an actual farm, and introduced to the farmer. Then they learn from the farmer observing him, listening to him, and taking part in the farm work.

The method used to teach them about nutrition is very creative; perhaps ingenious is the proper word. Every student is expected to bring ‘some thing from the sea’, and ‘some thing from the mountain’, for their interval snacks, which means that there has to be some thing that originates in the water and some that originates on land in every student’s snack box.

The students are allowed some time in a swimming pool. They are allowed to splash in the pool, naked, both boys and girls together. The principle behind that is that the children don’t develop any unnecessary curiosity over their genitals and any kind of physical defect is perceived ordinary.

There are play activities developed to improve the students’ self esteem. For example, there is a crawling activity which a student with a certain physical deformity can do better than others. Very nice, isn’t it?

The way Tetsuko Kuroyanagi written this book shows how deeply she feels about her old school. I hear Japan still uses similar teaching techniques in her schools and probably many other countries too. As for my country, Sri Lanka, the teachers can learn a lot from this school. This is a ‘must read’ for any body who is a teacher or wishes to be.