Not sufficiently expansive or introspective to engage a wide audience.
A detailed memoir that addresses diet, therapy, and spirituality.
Carter (Secrets of My Sex, 2008) begins her account in 2003 in a gastroenterologist’s office. At the time, she was 43 and had endured chronic stomach pain for years. She worried she might have cancer but refused invasive procedures and instead embarked on a raw food diet. The first third of her book, “Body,” details the challenges of this transition—including finding social acceptance for a diet that seemed extreme to many people, including her parents. Raw food helped Carter in some ways, but she remained unsatisfied; she yearned to be a writer and bemoaned her failure to be financially independent. Carter returned to dance, which she’d once studied at Juilliard, and explored Bikram yoga and energy-healing concepts. But she realized that her mind—particularly her anxieties—needed attention. In the second section, “Mind,” Carter tells of entering a spiritual psychology program at the University of Santa Monica, devising a course in transformational creative practices for alma mater Scripps College, and becoming a life and writing coach. She also published a poetry book in 2007. Still, her fears and self-doubt remained. The final third, “Spirit,” focuses on spiritual healing. After her mother’s death, Carter’s anxiety became “disabling,” she says, but after exploring reiki, craniosacral therapy, breath work, shamanic training, meditation, holistic psychiatry, and conventional medicine, she learned self-acceptance. Carter’s decade-spanning quest covers countless forms of therapy and self-help. Her relentless unease is palpable throughout, deftly portrayed through effective dialogue and memorable recollections. But it’s never quite clear what was specifically wrong with her—and therefore, what her book is truly about. She admits at one point that the book started as a memoir about raw food but gravitated far beyond that topic. The title would suggest a focus on her anxiety, but she never delves fully into that subject, either. She returns to the theme of her writing practice often, but her book isn’t about becoming a writer. As a result, readers may find themselves roaming through the book in search of its purpose.
Not sufficiently expansive or introspective to engage a wide audience.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-345-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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