An inspiring story for young people who may be facing similar problems, rendered in charming, self-deprecating humor.
A witty memoir about living with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Improv comedian Sher (Kissing Snowflakes, 2007) was like many other Jewish kids growing up in the suburbs of New York City, until her father died when she was ten. The traumatic event quickly triggered early signs of OCD. At first it manifested in counting steps and kissing and hugging photographs of her dead father, but it soon evolved into collecting sharp objects from the street that might have otherwise blown holes in car tires resulting in horrible injury or death. If she didn't collect these items, Sher writes, she would have felt responsible if something bad happened as a result. The weight of that guilt drove a need for relief. Praying, or what her mother euphemistically called Abby's “quiet time,” mollified her symptoms for a while. Sitting alone in her closet, Sher would pray 25, even 50 times that everyone who was sick would be healed, and to affirm with God that her father and mother would be her best friends forever. Eventually her “quiet time” stretched into hours, which cut into a burgeoning career as a member of the famed Second City improv troupe in Chicago, as well as her love life. When prayer couldn’t stop her feelings of chaos, the author fell into alcoholism, anorexia and self-mutilation. Though there are reasons to doubt parts of the author’s recollections—especially as she gets older and more accountable for herself—she is no less a talented, engaging writer.
An inspiring story for young people who may be facing similar problems, rendered in charming, self-deprecating humor.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8945-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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