A stirring record of a mother’s battle fought with zest, humor, and love.
Memoirist Ginsberg, who waited tables for 20 years to support her writing habit (Waiting, 2000), movingly details her experiences with a “different” child.
Ginsberg’s memoir is refreshingly free of “Why me?” whines; her devotion to her son is exemplary, her criticisms of unhelpful doctors and educators fair. She begins with Blaze’s difficult birth in 1987, when she was 24. A single mother who had recently broken up with the baby’s father, Ginsberg had a long labor, and Blaze was born with his umbilical cord wound around his neck, scoring low on post-birth tests. At home, she began rearing him with the help of her supportive family (her father accompanied her to most appointments). Like most mothers, Ginsberg loved her baby from the first moment and was determined to do the best for a boy who seemed bright and intelligent. When she enrolled Blaze in kindergarten, she expected him to be “a star in his class.” Instead, she was asked to meet with his teachers and the school psychologists, who told her Blaze should be transferred to the Special Education program. From then on, her life became an endless round of arguments with teachers and doctors who never made an exact diagnosis. Blaze hated loud noises (fire engines, garbage trucks, etc.) and found it hard to sit still, but he was sensitive to feelings and had a remarkable knowledge of music. Some suggested he was autistic, and most wanted her to put him on medication; she eventually tried Ritalin, stopping when he reacted badly to it. As the author chronicles her struggle to raise Blaze right, she celebrates the heroes (her family, some teachers) and nails the villains (obtuse, even cruel doctors and educators). Though Blaze’s difficult birth affected him in ways that cannot be specifically diagnosed, Ginsberg has learned that raising a child is an act of faith.
A stirring record of a mother’s battle fought with zest, humor, and love.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000432-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
