A probing and candid memoir.
A Ukrainian-American writer’s account of the heartbreaking details she learned about her parents and their relationship after the death of her widowed, alcoholic mother.
When Yurchyshyn returned to Boston after her mother died, she found a once “enchanting” home in shambles. Even more disturbing was the discovery of letters her parents had exchanged with each other that revealed unexpected depths of passionate affection. The author remembered her father, George, as “emotionally distant and occasionally abusive” and her mother, Anita, as “resentful and selfish.” Determined to understand parents she believed had never been in love, she began re-examining her life with them. Her Ukrainian-born father had been a bank executive and her colorfully bohemian mother, the international vice president of the Sierra Club. Both had been travelers who journeyed to cities all over the world. While her parents projected a glamorous image to others, Yurchyshyn saw a very different picture at home. George’s meanness and unprovoked rages terrified her, and Anita “looked like she was performing joyfulness without actually feeling it.” George eventually took a job in Ukraine, where he died in a car accident when the author was 16. Left alone in the United States, Anita began the slow, agonizing descent into the alcoholism that eventually contributed to her death years later. Seeking answers beyond the tantalizingly incomplete records her parents left behind, Yurchyshyn interviewed friends and family members. She learned of the difficult backgrounds George and Anita had both overcome and of the infant son they loved and lost before the author was born. Most devastating of all, Yurchyshyn came face to face with the truth behind her father’s death: George, who had returned to Ukraine to help establish a venture capital company, had been murdered. Searching and intense, Yurchyshyn’s book is not only a heartfelt examination of parent-child relationships; it is also an unsentimental interrogation of the complex nature of family love.
A probing and candid memoir.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-44704-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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