A tearjerker that will inspire those familiar with abuse.
A raw look at a childhood defined by abandonment and abuse, based on a true story.
When siblings Cindy and Eddie are left by their alcoholic-stripper mother at an orphanage in northern Georgia, the children made a pact to stay together and care for one another no matter what external forces might come between them. Soon after, however, the barely preschool-age pair was shuttled off to California to live with their aunt and uncle, Elaine and Hank Whitsett. The Whitsetts physically and verbally tormented the children until they were shells of their former selves. As a result, Cindy and Eddie developed coping mechanisms and turned to God to overcome feelings of abandonment and loneliness. Eddie, who emerges as the main protagonist, was left alone all day with abusive Elaine while Cindy attended school. Fortunately, next-door neighbor Nellie entered his life like an angel. Through her kindness and love, Eddie realized that his living circumstances were abnormal and unacceptable. He turned to nature for peace and solitude and his community for love and justice. Nash offers a heartwarming story about keeping faith and hope alive, even when feelings of pain and loneliness seem unbearable, and the characters are rich and textured. Despite a distracting change in narrative point of view in the second half from omniscient narrator to Eddie, Eddie’s defining moments and strong character are consistently engaging.
A tearjerker that will inspire those familiar with abuse.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-979-76040-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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