The younger sister of a woman with lifelong disabling mental illness describes her struggles to oversee her sister's care after their mother's death, and to acknowledge the deeply pervasive effects of the illness on her own self-image and outlook. Sally Moorman's manic-depressive emotional disorder first required hospitalization when she was 18 and her sister Peggy, the author, was ten. Over the years that followed, Peggy tried a few strategies to cope with Sally's problems: denying her sister's existence; trying to become perfect in order to banish suspicion in others (and in herself) that she herself might be mentally unstable; and, finally, fleeing from the family home in Virginia to live and work in New York. Meanwhile, the sisters' widowed mother made Sally's care her life's purpose, and it took all she could give, and more. Peggy dreaded what would happen when their mother died, and she helped her mother set up a trust fund for Sally's future needs. When Sally was 47 and Peggy 39, their mother did die; the nightmarish year that followed realized all of Peggy's worst fears as she was forced to shuttle back and forth to Virginia to ensure that Sally did not self-destruct. The trust-fund money allowed Peggy to hire a private social worker and the services of an agency of advocates for the mentally ill; this helped—but not enough to keep Peggy from being driven to exhaustion and despair. Finally, Peggy found a self-help group for siblings of the mentally ill, and they and Peggy's therapist helped her to begin to get on with her own life. The memoir ends on a happy, cautiously hopeful note, with Sally stabilized and Peggy married and a mother. Moorman tells her family's story with courage, honesty, and generosity. Those close to people with mental illness should find insight and gentle guidance here.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-02987-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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