A well-written account that focuses on the ups and downs of family life and the rewards of religious and marital devotion.
A woman recounts her childhood in rural Indiana and her long, passionate marriage to her high school sweetheart in this debut memoir.
Scutt grew up in small-town Indiana with a father who veered from silly to violent. With calm and even prose, the author revisits her worst moments, including having to jump out a window to escape his drunken outbursts. Surprisingly, Scutt’s father was eventually saved by a minister and never had another drop of alcohol for the rest of his life. As a teenager, she was slowly adjusting to this new incarnation of her father when she met Paul—the real focus of her memoir. As she puts it, this book is “the story of our attraction, our falling in love, my salvation.” After a few years of casual dating, Paul and Scutt married. (She tenderly narrates their first few hours as a couple, hinting subtly at their complete naïveté: They were nervous checking into a hotel and undressing in front of each other.) Their newfound coupledom would soon be interrupted by the draft, with Paul being shipped off to Vietnam for a harrowing year in the new bride’s life. Upon his return, they moved across the country and up the economic ladder as Paul ascended in the corporate world. But with each move and bigger house, Scutt always keeps the focus on their relationship, investigating Paul’s manipulative nature and how their devotion to both each other and their faith kept them together. Some readers may balk at the author’s insistence on staying with Paul—especially after a counselor told her point-blank to leave him. But her persistence and dedication to Scripture and the institution of marriage will likely be appreciated by many Christian readers. Overall, Scutt elevates her memoir from being just another life story with carefully selected details pulled from her memory and letters exchanged between the couple, especially during Paul’s time in Vietnam. She also shows a talent for creating wrenching dramatic moments; her early encounters with her father and the scenes of Paul’s eventual, heartbreaking death are particularly well-crafted.
A well-written account that focuses on the ups and downs of family life and the rewards of religious and marital devotion.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984562-12-8
Page Count: 190
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2019
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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