A medical account that successfully examines the deeper fears readers have about death and dissatisfaction.
A woman recounts coming to terms with a life-threatening heart illness in this inspirational memoir.
A retired emergency room and ICU nurse, Speake (Slow Hope, 2005) did not accept the news that she had idiopathic cardiomyopathy with as much grace as one might expect. “My cardiac diagnosis tilted my whole world off its axis,” she recalls. “It felt like I’d awakened one morning to discover I’d been moved to a new neighborhood in a new city, and I hated it. In fact, it wasn’t long before I developed a whole new list of hates.” Her medication caused nausea and insomnia, and the 10,000 steps she was expected to walk every day seemed a Herculean feat even with the help of George (or “G,” as she calls him), her husband of 25 years. The author was interested in the reasons for her heart disease, specifically whether it had to do with the physical and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her alcoholic parents. But, as Speake learned, definitive answers weren’t always available, and with a potentially fatal condition, she needed to figure out a way to be at peace with her past, her present, and whatever the future might hold. This memoir chronicles the author’s journey confronting her own mortality, which included moving beyond the treatments and statistics of Western medicine and into explorations of reiki, mindfulness, and a new sort of relationship with God. Speake’s sharp prose captures the tension she felt in her search for answers: “Had the life I’d led contributed to my heart disease diagnosis? Had there been too many divorces? Too many men? Had my parents been too abusive? For most of my adult life, I’d been a single parent. Had all the years of my hard work in the end been too hard and the years too many?” The book is less about the gravity of the author’s illness than her own inability to not panic over its potential to be serious. In this way, her situation is surprisingly relatable—everyone is dying, fast or slow—and the need to find a way to be OK with that is as urgent for her as it is for readers.
A medical account that successfully examines the deeper fears readers have about death and dissatisfaction.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-437-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
