Journal entries combine for a short, poignant record of two lives, a moving history of a mother and her child.
A loving, dutiful daughter writes about her desperate confrontation with her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Canadian author Borrie trained as a nurse, studied writing and theater arts, and competed as a dancer. Though she holds degrees in public health and law, her vocation is clearly creative nonfiction. Short passages, rendered in the immediacy of present tense, of childhood recollections and lonely adult life, alternate with conversations with an ailing parent. The memories of childhood are occasionally unhappy but more often idyllic. The brief passing scenes include the brutal death of a beloved teenage brother, a distant stepfather, and dismal days at boarding school. Borrie also recounts the halcyon days of gardening with her grandfather, boating with her mother, and enjoying tea and ginger snaps. Eventually, the mother-daughter bonding transformed into a deluge of dealing with her mother’s prescriptions, and family and friends drifted away. The author was briefly married to a man with a handlebar mustache. (That’s all we learn about the ephemeral husband). Ever more exhausted, Borrie, single again, visited her mother in her nursing home daily and talked with her many times a day until her mother was no longer able to use the phone. The author transcribes the conversations marked by her mother’s stream of consciousness and confusion; she never forgot to call her daughter “love” and “lovey” even as she ultimately forgot her name and identity. As Borrie presents them, her mother’s non sequiturs, surely a badge of Alzheimer’s, make a wonderful kind of poetry, mysterious and even witty. Finally, her wandering thoughts could no longer be expressed properly. The denouement is, of course, inevitable: her mother passed away, and the grieving daughter must deal with the aftermath.
Journal entries combine for a short, poignant record of two lives, a moving history of a mother and her child.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-664-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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.
