An often tiresome, rarely inspiring collection of first-person narratives by women, touching on everything from the joys of motherhood to the contentment of independent living. There is little new or creatively said in Underhill’s anthology (she is president of her own marketing and consulting firm, specializing in women’s programs and product promotions), which resulted from a general request for stories written by women about life’s stages and phases. Most of the contributions, culled from a total response of 500, are marred by a triteness and a mawkishness that dull even those stories worth telling. The lackluster prose is too often peppered with clichés like “More times than not, what seems like a bad change will open a whole new door of wonderful experiences and opportunities. We must keep in mind that past experiences will have positive effects if we let them.” The few refreshing voices belong to women who have questioned the status quo, who challenge and provoke. In “Fighting Discrimination With Dignity,” Pastor Paula E. Buford writes about her experience speaking at an all-male Southern Baptist pastors” conference in 1984. When asked by an elderly pastor, “As a woman, how will you keep from being seen as a sex object in the pulpit?” she decorously replies, “I—m not sure that I can. Tell me, how do you deal with this issue? I—d like to learn from you.” Also more remarkable than yet another account of a woman facing middle age is Marlynn Peron’s essay on discovering that her son is gay. After the initial shock and sorrow, Peron decides not only to offer her son the unconditional love she feels he deserves, but additionally urges other mothers of gay children to openly stand up for them. Homosexuality is genetic, Peron argues, and parents must ease a child’s pain and shame. The more typical voice here is better expressed in soap-opera scripts. (First serial to Woman’s Day)
Pub Date: May 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52460-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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