Rice’s rather banal prose doesn’t do justice to the anguished content, but her story is honest and moving nonetheless.
In her first work of nonfiction, Rice (Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, 2008, etc.) tells the story of her departure from, and return to, her Creator.
This spiritual autobiography focuses on the author’s youth in New Orleans and her reconciliation with Catholicism during the past decade. Growing up in the Crescent City during the ’40s and ’50s, Rice was surrounded by an entirely Catholic world in which she reveled. Drawn to church history, the lives of the saints and the beauty of the liturgy, she maintained an unquestioning faith and a deep desire to live a heroic life for God. Late in her teenage years, after her mother’s death from alcoholism, Rice moved with her father and sister to Dallas. The change in lifestyle was so complete, she remarks, that “we might as well have been entering America for the first time.” It wouldn’t be long before she began questioning everything she once believed, and by the time she graduated from college she was an atheist. That change, she now realizes, was prompted by her distaste for the rigid, restrictive Catholicism of the time (circa 1960): “I could not separate my personal relationship with God, and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church.” After several years of bohemian existence in San Francisco, Rice hit it big in the literary world with her fiction about Lestat and his fellow vampires. Throughout the nearly four decades of her atheism, however, she longed for her lost faith. Collecting sculptures of saints and visiting holy sites across the world, she struggled with her desire to believe. Finally, in 1998, she reconciled herself to the Catholic Church and found that its character had altered greatly since her youth. In 2002, she made a further personal decision to commit her writing from then on to God.
Rice’s rather banal prose doesn’t do justice to the anguished content, but her story is honest and moving nonetheless.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26827-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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