An inspirational affirmation of the unique worth of every individual.
A psychotherapist and leading advocate for women with disabilities chronicles her struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination.
As someone with cerebral palsy, Rousso (Gender Matters: Training for Educators Working with Students with Disabilities, 2002, etc.) had to cope with physical limitations (controlling her motions, blurred speech, an ungainly appearance and contorted facial expressions) and the response of others to them. She describes her own shock at seeing her image in a mirror, and she forced herself to confront the reality of her “loopy, lopsided walk; those darting, dancing shoulders; those wandering, wiggly fingers; that goofy, gimpy smile.” The author credits her mother with nurturing her sense of independence and self-worth, despite her insistence that it was necessary to try to disguise her disabilities in order to make herself more acceptable to “the normalcy brigade.” Growing up in the 1950s, Rousso faced “[i]gnorance, fear, nastiness, and prejudice” against the disabled and the expectation that a woman's destiny was shaped by her ability to attract a husband. Her father told her that he would not have married someone with her disabilities. Nonetheless, Rousso credits her disability with giving her the freedom to pursue a career outside the home—where she also experienced prejudice. After receiving her master’s degree, she was expelled from the psychotherapeutic training institute where she was enrolled because the staff feared that her appearance would upset clients. Rousso writes that the feminist movement of the 1970s gave her the strength to free herself from internalizing such cultural stereotypes. She became a successful psychotherapist and mentor for disabled young women. Two decades later, the author formed an enduring love relationship. Now, writes Rousso, she is able to accept her body and sense its uncontrolled motions “as signs of life, not limits.”
An inspirational affirmation of the unique worth of every individual.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4399-0937-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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