Though averagely written, Griner delivers an important message, particularly for young adults, about embracing your...
The growing pains of a gay student athlete.
With Hovey, Griner, the three-time All-American and No. 1 selection in the 2013 WNBA draft, writes a coming-of-age memoir about her struggle to live authentically. A bullied and despondent junior high school student in Houston, Texas, she wished away her height (she grew to 6 feet 8 inches tall), strength and tenacity, the traits that would soon make her a basketball phenomenon. Griner's adolescent voice is earnest, as when she writes that she didn’t tell her parents the cruelties she endured "because my mom would get sad and my dad would get mad." She excelled at basketball in high school (a video of her dunking went viral), and her growing confidence gave her a sense of purpose; however, her misery continued when her overbearing father kicked her out of the house for being gay. Though colleges across the country heavily recruited her, she hastily chose Baylor University for its strong basketball program and close proximity to her ailing mother. However, given Baylor's ethical stance against homosexuality, some readers may question how an out lesbian could fail to do her due diligence and arrive on campus unaware of this policy. Griner resented head coach Kim Mulkey's insistence that she hide her sexuality, and despite leading her team to a national championship in her junior year, she continued to feel "a growing sense that who I am…needed to be hidden away in order for me to survive my time at Baylor." This revelation will not come as a shock. Since leaving Baylor, Griner has become an advocate for LGBTQ youth, assuring them that "the rewards of being authentic far outweigh the risks."
Though averagely written, Griner delivers an important message, particularly for young adults, about embracing your uniqueness.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-230933-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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