A touching and at times traumatic family story, but always positive and told with love.
Surviving and thriving as a family with autistic twins.
Ana and Curt Warner take turns narrating this powerful tale of life with twin boys with autism. The couple met while Curt was a successful member of the Seattle Seahawks, but this isn’t a sports story. An early priority for the Warners was to build a family, but they first suffered from a tragic stillbirth and miscarriages. Finally, a healthy son, Jonathan, was born, soon followed by twin boys, Austin and Christian. It was soon clear that the twins were not developing normally, but despite a series of physician visits, no answers could be found. At last, they found a doctor who realized right away that the twins had autism, which was, at the time, a little-understood disorder. The Warners’ story is both heart-wrenching and also uplifting, as they chronicle how they learned to handle two children who kicked holes in walls, ate tongue depressors in the doctor’s office, discovered new ways to escape the house, and watched Disney films with absolute obsession. The family struggled through isolation, misplaced guilt, anger, and radical changes in lifestyle, ranging from diet to constant home repair. Two low points drive home the difficulties the couple faced. First, there were Ana’s thoughts of suicide, in which she imagined freeing her husband and older son by driving herself and the twins off a cliff. Second, while playing out a scene from a Disney film, Austin set the family’s house on fire, destroying it and nearly taking his mother’s life. Despite unimaginable struggles, the family survived and even adopted a baby girl. The twins, meanwhile, moved into early adulthood with part-time jobs. Rather than delve into arguments over the causes of autism, the authors focus on awareness and the need for support.
A touching and at times traumatic family story, but always positive and told with love.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0056-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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