A vivid picture of the havoc wreaked by alcoholism and poverty and of the true grit require to overcome them.
Further plumbing of the past from memoirist Moss (Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter, 2000), here recounting her journey out of poverty and efforts to escape an alcoholic heritage.
Moss likens this work to one of her mother’s patchwork quilts, constructed of seemingly separate pieces that together create a pattern. She opens with a bittersweet childhood recollection of earning a nickel pulling weeds out of a neighbor’s sidewalk in Alabama in 1965 and then moves on to her early adulthood. She had two disastrous marriages with controlling, abusive men, bore a child, and finally, at 27, left her parents’ home to study art at the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida. Struggling to make ends meet and to shape a life for herself and her son, Jason, in Florida and later in Iowa, where she studied art at Drake University, Moss faces the contempt of neighbors when her welfare dependence becomes known. She shows spunk and imagination in dealing with this, and throughout, Moss retains an impressive determination to better her life. But her relationship with another abusive man, this time a mental patient with whom she becomes obsessed, very nearly knocks her off course. Her eyes opened by therapy and by reading Women Who Love Too Much, she eventually comes to understand how having grown up with a frequently drunk and sometimes violent father has harmed her ability to form healthy relationships with men. From time to time, the author returns to Alabama, both in person and in memory, and her Alabama stories are filled with angry, self-destructive men, the women who put up with them, and the children who suffer the consequences. The end, though, is a happy one, with Moss finding love, peace, and security in her third marriage and fulfillment in her work as an artist and writer.
A vivid picture of the havoc wreaked by alcoholism and poverty and of the true grit require to overcome them.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2945-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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