A French mother’s lyrical and haunting memoir of the deaths of her two young daughters and how she has coped with this terrible loss. In 1980 Jurgensen’s daughters, Mathilde (age 7) and Elise (age 4), were killed by a drunk driver. How does one live with the pain and grief of surviving one’s children? How does one express this loss and love in words? The Disappearance is Jurgensen’s unsentimental and candid response to these questions. In a series of letters to a friend written from 1991 to 1993, the author draws an intimate portrait of her life before and after her daughters’ deaths. The epistolary approach serves Jurgensen well, eliciting honest emotions and a lean lyricism. Slowly and sensitively she introduces us to the facts of the tragic accident. We learn about her own reaction to the girls’ deaths and how she managed to continue her life, and about her loving relationship with her husband, Laurent, which helps sustain her in times of deep depression and grief. Jurgensen’s pain is palpable and her book is at times too sad to read without setting it down. One of the most compelling aspects of Jurgensen’s story is how the two dead daughters have remained a presence in the family, even as the family grew with the addition of two subsequent children. From innocent questions about family size to her two younger children’s inquiries and formulations about their “older” siblings, Jurgensen candidly discusses her emotional and rational responses to both strangers and loved ones about her first two daughters. We celebrate with her when an old acquaintance who knew the girls comments when seeing the younger two: “they are so, so alike all four of them.” Jurgensen’s is a powerful voice for the unbearable sadness caused by death and the courage and love it takes to live with both the pain of loss and the cherished memories.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04776-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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