No psychic chicken soup here, but a chronology of life's roller coaster that may intrigue those on the same crooked track.
Told with grace and humor, a life story that gives new meaning to the word resilience, from an ambitious and successful woman whose travails once seemed unending.
Presently the editor of AARP's My Generation magazine, Carter boasts a career history most journalists can only fantasize about. Starting with Air and Water News, she moved on to Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Esquire (of which she became editorial director), then launched her own magazine, New York Woman. She had a thoughtful and loving husband, an apartment in Manhattan, and a house in upstate New York. But a car spinout when they were on vacation in Nova Scotia was followed by a series of disasters. A taxi accident fractured her jaw, knocked out most of her teeth, and shredded her lip; her face had to be reconstructed. In the middle of launching New York Woman, she discovered her husband was gay. Not long after that, the magazine was sold, her upstate house burned down, she underwent treatment with a psychotherapist, who ultimately recommended exorcism, and she began to suffer from asthma. Her mother developed a brain tumor, and a promising affair ended. Nevertheless, Carter met and married a man who appeared to be a soulmate. A week after their wedding and the celebration of New York Woman’s fifth anniversary, she was told the magazine would fold. Then came the diagnosis of malignant breast cancer requiring immediate surgery. Carter got through the surgery and the subsequent chemotherapy; ten years later, she has launched a new magazine and remains happily with her second husband. Chapters about her successes and woes are interspersed with sections on growing up Jewish in predominantly Christian Florida and attending college in Michigan.
No psychic chicken soup here, but a chronology of life's roller coaster that may intrigue those on the same crooked track.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6761-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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