A passionate, occasionally convoluted account of personal redemption.
A best-selling memoirist tells the story of how he survived—and came to terms with—the traumatic near-deaths of his youngest brother and former fiancee.
Martinez’s (The Boy Kings of Texas, 2012) youngest brother, Derek, was born to parents whose marriage was “crippled by rot.” Spoiled with attention as a child, Derek hero-worshipped his hard-living, hard-drinking older brother. But he also suffered deeply when his parents divorced and the mother he adored shunted him off to live with one relative after another. So when Martinez, who went to live in Seattle, learned that his brother was in a coma as a result of an alcohol-related blackout and fall, he felt profound guilt. His misery was compounded by the fact he chose not to return to Texas due to a feud with another brother. But Martinez could not escape his own conscience and found himself “collecting little brothers” in his neighborhood. Then he met Stephanie, a troubled bisexual woman whose “anguish…brokenness…and misfit qualit[ies]” mirrored his own. The pair hurried into a dysfunctional engagement. At the same time, Martinez befriended an older woman named Sarah, with whom he fell deeply in love. The author eventually broke off his relationship with Stephanie, but not long afterward, she drove her car off a cliff. Like Derek, she suffered brain injury, went into a coma and survived; unlike him, she had the shocked and bewildered Martinez by her side until she recovered. At Sarah’s insistence, Martinez began to write because “it was going to be [his] only way out” and the way he could finally align the “drunken compass” of his broken heart. This tragicomic memoir is not just about the complications of family, but also about the power of narrative to heal and make whole.
A passionate, occasionally convoluted account of personal redemption.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493001408
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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