A decent cultural study, but many readers may desire more analysis and wisdom.
In her debut memoir, Wilson portrays our culture’s intolerance of homosexuality through a mother-daughter story of dysfunction, loss and empowerment.
The author chronicles her childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, her coming of age in the ’70s and the reestablishment of her relationship with her mother as an adult. The first part of the narrative relates how Gloria, Wilson’s mother, attempted suicide at least three times before Wilson was 12. Gloria spent extensive time in mental hospitals and was subjected to heavy medication and shock therapy. Partly because of her mother’s lack of parenting, Wilson tried to make herself nearly invisible to please those around her. She fled to college at Grinnell in Iowa and then to San Francisco to find herself. There she became active in both the gay-rights and women’s-liberation movements and came out to her friends and family as a lesbian. As Gloria healed and found her voice, Wilson discovered that her mother was also a lesbian and that her depression was fueled by intolerance for her lifestyle choice. Eventually the author and her mother reconnected, and the final part of the book outlines her mother’s death from cancer and the resolution and boundary setting that occurred before she died. While the book takes place during a dynamic time for lesbians and society as a whole, Wilson offers very little reflection and synthesis. As a practicing psychotherapist, the author has the tools to dig deeper, but the story unfolds as a straightforward, chronological series of events.
A decent cultural study, but many readers may desire more analysis and wisdom.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58005-432-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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