Altogether brave and informative.
British journalist Moore brings a reporter’s eye and a mother’s love to this exploration of autism.
The author’s two elder sons have autism, which afflicts roughly 1 in 100 children. Their diagnoses came as a shock. George and Sam had seemed perfectly normal as babies, but autism is rarely diagnosed before 24 months. Moore tells parents what to watch out for. Healthy kids play games that move through richly imagined worlds: The toy truck becomes an airplane, and the child becomes a pilot who’s going to rescue his mommy from a bad guy. Autistic children’s play gets stuck; they can push the truck backward and forward, but they never put a story line in motion. Autistic people, the author explains, have a different sense of self than everyone else. They can’t conceive that other people don’t know the things they know. So when George loses a ball, he might come running to his mother in tears, but it doesn’t occur to him to explain why he’s upset. Moore matter-of-factly presents the challenges of her life: the expensive tutoring that autistic kids require, the strange eating habits they develop, the simple fact that she may well be caring for George and Sam until she dies. She offers only an opaque window onto the presumably tumultuous shock of receiving the diagnoses and, most frustratingly, refuses to delve into the collapse of her marriage. At one point, she had a husband, Min. He eventually had a breakdown and they split up. While the author could hardly be expected to tell her erstwhile husband’s story, a discussion of the strain autism puts on a marriage would have been helpful. Parents struggling to stay together could use details as sensitive and evocative as those Moore provides to illuminate the interior roots of her sons’ often strange behavior.
Altogether brave and informative.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35893-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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