Useful insights into how to run and why one woman does so for sport and for its life-enhancing effects.
With humor and honesty, Elle UK books editor Heminsley details the anxiety and exhilaration she felt when she decided to try running in her mid-30s.
Like most children, the author had enjoyed running around and playing, but over the years, she writes, she had forgotten she could run: "Somehow I had lost sight of the fact that not being a runner and being unable to run were not one and the same." Her first run quickly turned into a walk, and she didn't lace up her shoes for another three months. Then her brother announced that he was entering the London Marathon, and Heminsley decided to sign up, too. Months of training and proper eating ensued. The author takes readers on the emotional ups and downs of that first race as the miles passed slowly by and Heminsley reached and pushed past her limits. The author’s supportive family, including a father who had run marathons and a brother also in training, encouraged Heminsley to finish that first marathon and sign up for many more. Each time she finished a race, she experienced the high of accomplishment followed shortly thereafter with the question, now what do I do? As the years and miles passed underfoot, Heminsley spent increasing amounts of time questioning this need to run. Finally, she realized she didn't need to run for a cause, although she did; she didn't need to run for weight loss or exercise, although the benefits of running were evident in her new, more streamlined body. She could just run for the sake of running. For anyone contemplating running, Heminsley provides valuable insight into the mechanics and emotions inherent in the sport. The author also includes information regarding proper gear, physical ailments and preparing for a marathon.
Useful insights into how to run and why one woman does so for sport and for its life-enhancing effects.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9712-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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