A compulsive telling of what it is like to have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) combined with the vocal and muscular tics that are characteristic of Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that runs in families. Wilensky was eight when she first developed the involuntary head and body jerks that would plague her from then on. Not long after, she found that counting up to 60 or repeating actions in multiples of six had an anxiety-relieving effect. The OCD symptoms grew to compulsions to write the alphabet repeatedly, make lists of little words from big words, to avoid (actually hate) odd numbers, to get up or move only at even times, to an ever-expanding repertoire of rites and rituals, most of which she tried to hide (now, in revealing all, the writing itself becomes excessive, elaborate, self-preoccupied). The family was convinced her problem was “psychological,” and her father in particular was devastating in his criticism. (Readers will clue in early to the fact that he actually had OCD himself—of the excessive tidy-fit variety.) Because she was very bright, the endless hours in obedience to Tourette’s and OCD didn—t prevent her achieving well enough to go from prep school to Vassar to Columbia’s graduate program in creative writing. Along the way, she managed to pass from fear and loathing at being touched to love and marriage. She was in her mid-20s when she realized she had OCD and got a referral from the family doctor. This led to the full diagnosis of Tourette’s with OCD and medication—haloperidol for tics and Prozac and behavioral therapy for OCD. The new knowledge also led to Dad’s diagnosis and treatment. That the diagnosis should come so late and that an intelligent family and friends should be so uninformed suggests the need for books like Wilensky’s. That it has helped the author in her own journey to self-revelation is abundantly clear.
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0185-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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