A vivid portrait of a complex relationship, as gripping, at times, as a good thriller.
Disturbing first-person account of one young woman’s emotional captivity by another.
Kraus was 23, grieving for her mother who had just died of cancer, and alone in a new city when she met Jane, a pretty, amusing young woman who seemed to offer empathy and camaraderie. Both worked at a bookstore in San Francisco, where Kraus, a recent college graduate from the Midwest, was planning to study screenwriting at Stanford. Within short order, the co-workers became fast friends and then roommates and then more. Gradually, Kraus’s life was taken over by Jane, her plans for graduate work put aside. Jane, manipulative and seductive, alternating between sweetness and cruelty, seemed to need Kraus’s love and support, and Kraus gave both generously. The inheritance her mother left her was wiped out and credit-card debt mounted as Kraus willingly supported them both. While the author’s father, brother, and sister became alarmed by the unhealthy relationship developing between the two women, and her psychiatrist tried to open her eyes to the source of her need for Jane, the warning signs that Jane was bad news passed by Kraus undetected. Promiscuity, shoplifting, stealing cash at work, gratuitous lies, emotional blackmail, and physical violence were par for the course for Jane, yet through the strife, Kraus says, were times of great happiness, affection, sharing, and fun. It was only when Kraus heard an NPR documentary on borderline personality disorder that she recognized that she had become deeply entangled with a seriously disturbed individual and that she herself was slipping into Jane’s world. Once able to see Jane clearly, Kraus made her escape, fleeing San Francisco. That her freedom was only temporary is a shock, for Jane was welcomed back when she reappeared in Kraus’s life a couple of years later. When they parted for the second time, it was because, Kraus says, she had learned to value her own needs over Jane’s.
A vivid portrait of a complex relationship, as gripping, at times, as a good thriller.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1403-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
