An addition to the world of addiction literature worth reading, full of grim reality that thankfully never crosses the line...
An honest, introspective account of a vice cop’s methamphetamine addiction.
Written with the assistance of writing instructor and novelist Woodruff (My Wife's Affair, 2010, etc.), Moore’s harrowing account begins at the lowest point of the author’s life. Plunged into the depths of her addiction, the despair and fear are palpable as she chronicles her frantic attempt to commit suicide. “I’m living in hell and I can’t even die,” she writes. Moore then spins the narrative back in time to fill in her story before her addiction and near death. Before her first snort, the author was an innocent blonde island transplant, having moved from New Mexico to Hawaii. A waitress looking to finally put down roots, she applied to the Maui Police Department on a whim and was shocked when she was accepted. Once she became part of the department, Moore’s hard work and dedication set her apart, and she began working on drug cases on her own in a feverishly idealistic dream to rid the islands of the scourge of meth. Then a series of emotional drains left her feeling like she couldn’t cope, and the circumstances of her job left her with a small amount of meth in her hands. The spiral that comes next may be predictable, but it feels fresh in Moore’s telling, and the outcome is no less terrifying. “The meth gave me a false sense of reality,” she writes, “masking the truth and keeping me alive until it almost killed me.” Somehow, knowing that the author survived to tell her story doesn’t offer any comfort or allay fear for her well-being. This effect can only be attributed to the strong writing, with Woodruff helping to bring the story to life.
An addition to the world of addiction literature worth reading, full of grim reality that thankfully never crosses the line into gratuitous territory.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9635-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
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
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