An inspiring, instructive life story.
A pioneer in the treatment of learning disabilities describes how she diagnosed her own mental disability and created unique exercises to retrain her brain.
Arrowsmith-Young’s goal is to train educators—her method is now taught at more than 30 schools in the United States and Canada—and create tailor-made cognitive exercises for students at her Toronto school. The author chronicles how she overcame her inability to conceptualize causality despite having excellent audio and visual memory. She could “make no sense of the relationship between the big and little hands of an analogue clock.” Even simple arithmetic was beyond her capability, and her reading comprehension was poor. She had difficulty following conversations, catching only fragments at a time and then replaying them in her head later. By dint of her “singular work ethic and gritty determination to succeed,” she stumbled through school by relying on her phenomenal memory to compensate for her disabilities. While studying child behavior in graduate school in the late 1970s, Arrowsmith-Young discovered a book by Soviet neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria, in which the author described his work with brain-injured World War II veterans. She was amazed to find that many of their symptoms paralleled her own, and she also learned about rats whose brains showed physical change as a result of being placed in stimulating environments. Consequently, the author devised a series of increasingly complex exercises, drilling herself with flash cards showing the hands of a clock in different positions. Her success in increasing her mental function laid the basis for her teaching method, which challenges students to directly address their handicaps. Arrowsmith-Young provides helpful anecdotes that indicate impressive improvements achieved by her students by following the mental exercises that she has developed.
An inspiring, instructive life story.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0793-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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