A proud and devoted mother’s overdone portrait of her celebrated gymnast daughter’s trials and triumphs. Claudia Miller relates her daughter’s progress from jungle-gym-climbing toddler to leader of the first US women’s gymnastic team to bring home the Olympic gold. For those who don’t know a double twisting Yurchenko from a piked full twisting double back, the particulars of Shannon Miller’s gymnastic feats in innumerable competitions quickly become tedious. Of more interest to parents of an exceptional child is the story of the Miller family’s efforts to keep one daughter’s striking success from having negative effects on her older sister and younger brother. With Shannon’s success came tension between her parents and her controlling and demanding coach (by this time, Claudia Miller had trained to become a gymnastics judge, and some second-guessing of the coach was probably inevitable) and difficult decisions concerning agents and money. Recurrent injuries were another problem, especially since the author is a Christian Scientist and her husband a Baptist; for Shannon, Christian Science practitioners and prayer were combined with consultations with physicians, medical treatments, surgery, and physical therapy as needed. Rather surprisingly, Miller barely mentions the controversial weight issue in her discussions of her daughter’s health, despite the fact that at age 15 Shannon weighed only 76 pounds. Even allowing for motherly prejudice, the portrait of the young gymnast that emerges is one any parent would be proud of: an outstanding athlete who is also a top student, and someone who makes exceptional demands on herself but is at the same time thoughtful and considerate of others. As an Olympic gymnast, Shannon Miller had the eyes of the world on her, but this overly technical treatment won—t put her on the bestseller podium where fellow gymnast Dominique Moceanu once stood. (8 color, 42 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8061-3110-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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