Readers who fell in love with Rodriguez’s chronicle of life in Afghanistan will surely revel in this candid, intimate tale...
After being forced to flee Afghanistan, Rodriguez (co-author: Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, 2007) initially settled on an isolated mountaintop in Northern California. Here, she recounts her rocky readjustment to American life and eventual relocation to Mexico.
Back in the States, the once-confident, outgoing businesswoman found life in California unsettling, and she could not find suitable work or make friends. Eventually diagnosed with PTSD, the author received little substantive help for her problem. “I felt everything, all right,” she writes, “but wallowing in all that loss, grief, and loneliness left me exhausted, and even more depressed.” Always an adventure seeker and traveler, Rodriguez opted for a cruise to Mazatlan, Mexico, with a male friend. Beguiled by the sun, sand and ocean, she returned to the resort community and purchased a tiny bungalow. “So finally, I did what I should have done much, much earlier,” she writes. “I gave myself permission to leave.” The author packed her cat and her belongings into her car and headed south to her new home, where she slowly began rebuilding her life. She found a counselor who understood PTSD, and she surrounded herself with a vibrant group of new friends. Eventually, Rodriguez’s son relocated from the States and quickly married a local woman. Soon enough, the author became a grandmother. “And as horrified as some people my age might have been hearing news like that, I, on the other hand, was struck with wonder,” she writes. Business blossomed when Rodriguez opened a salon featuring pedicures and manicures. Realizing local girls needed help securing their futures, the author established Project Mariposa, which provides funds for girls to attend beauty school.
Readers who fell in love with Rodriguez’s chronicle of life in Afghanistan will surely revel in this candid, intimate tale of starting over in middle age in a new country.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1066-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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