Both funny and darkly poignant.
A Denver-based comic’s account of losing his younger sister to suicide and learning to cope with her death.
Cayton-Holland, who created and stars in the sitcom Those Who Can’t, grew up in a family under the guidance of “flower children” parents, who raised him and his two sisters “to rage against the injustices of the world.” But exposure to the suffering of others, combined with his own natural hypersensitivity, caused the author to seek ways of “circumventing the hurt and upset.” As a child, he developed personal rituals—he was later diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder—to make sure “life as I knew it didn’t collapse.” As he got older, Cayton-Holland discovered that comedy also helped him feel better about the world and himself. The childhood bits he performed in front of his parents, schoolmates, and, later, audiences at Denver’s premier comedy clubs eventually led to a career as a respected stand-up comic. But his brilliant and beloved younger sister Lydia, who shared both her brother’s hypersensitivity and quirky sense of humor, chose to live a quiet life outside the hustle and bustle of Denver, fostering “dogs and cats and musicians and outcasts.” The family gently tried to prod her toward a career, but she refused until finally Cayton-Holland convinced her to return to Denver to help him at his comedy shows. Not long afterward, Lydia had the first of several breakdowns. While she struggled with depression and exasperated family members with her despair, the author’s career soared. The reality of just how serious her illness was only registered when Lydia killed herself in 2012. Devastated, Cayton-Holland and his family began a long and painful journey toward emotional healing that forced them to learn difficult lessons in letting go and self-forgiveness. This candid and humane book not only memorializes the life of a beloved sister; it also celebrates the gift of awakened spiritual and emotional sensibilities that loss inevitably leaves in its wake.
Both funny and darkly poignant.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7016-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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