This sensitive, eloquent coming-of-age story articulates the often painful intersections of religion, power, illness, and death. Mystery writer Wilson (Trouble in Transylvania, 1993, etc.) departs from fiction here to unveil her Christian Science upbringing in uncompromising, often disturbing detail. The crux of the book is how family and faith fall apart when the author's mother, a devout Christian Scientist, dies of breast cancer at a relatively young age (and after a failed suicide attempt). Given Christian Science's teaching that illness and death are merely errors of the mind that must be corrected, the family was forbidden to mourn this loss. Such denial meant that grief and anger were channeled into other, often horrifying, modes of expression: her father's remarriage to a sadistic woman and the author's own floundering, which made her receptive to her new stepbrother's sexual advances. In this sense, the book is an unforgettable testimony to the destructive powers of some religious beliefs. But paradoxically, it is also a nuanced acknowledgment of the ways in which sectarian religion orders the chaos of the world, providing new opportunities for its followers. Wilson concedes, for instance, that Christian Science healing continues to provide an important outlet for women, who comprise almost 90 percent of healers. She can also see that Christian Science helped her to define her own strength as a woman—her identity forged not just through surviving her mother's death but through more mundane statements of faith, such as her refusal to accept a school polio vaccine in the 1950s. Historically informed and refreshingly candid—though a bit too long—this offers not just an individual memoir of an increasingly obscure religious movement, but also a more general exploration of the crises of faith and health in the 20th century. (Of particular interest is Wilson's parallel of contemporary guru Deepak Chopra with Mary Baker Eddy.)
Pub Date: March 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15066-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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