by Cristy Maddox ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2019
An earnest, thoughtful reminiscence by a woman who found solace in a renewed relationship with God.
Maddox tells her story of keeping faith in times of illness in this debut Christian memoir.
Maddox had a good life: Raised in a loving family in rural Virginia, she met her future husband on the first day of college. Even so, she found herself losing her strong Christian faith in her early 20s, feeling that God wasn’t talking to her the way he talked to her friends and fellow parishioners. As it turned out, God’s silence was just evidence that everything was going well, and she would hear his voice soon enough, during her struggle to get pregnant, two miscarriages, and the terrible grief she felt having to give up an infant she was fostering for 10 months. Through these times, Maddox’s faith in God grew, and so did her family. She and her husband, Greg, managed to have two sons and adopted a daughter from Rwanda. The greatest test still lay ahead of her, however: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome or POTS. It began with dizziness and numbness on the right side of her body: “In retrospect, Greg and I are probably a little too chill about things like this, especially with both of us working in the medical field. If this happened to anyone else, I would have told them to go to the emergency room.” As the reality of her new disease and the limitations it placed on her life began to sink in, Maddox doubled down on her faith and continued to find God’s lessons in the daily problems in her life. The author’s prose is taut and emotional, particularly when describing the effects of POTS on her life: “I’m crying because of how utterly helpless and pathetic I feel. I’m an adult who can’t figure out how to book a hotel! I’m an adult who can’t figure out how to use my phone to let my husband know what’s going on!” Maddox is deeply and unquestioningly Christian, and her fairly frequent conversations with God may turn off secular readers. Even so, her problems are real and rendered in detail, and the positive spin she is able to place on them is sincere and encouraging.
An earnest, thoughtful reminiscence by a woman who found solace in a renewed relationship with God.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64146-354-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Made for Grace Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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