Despite a muddled narrative, a haunting portrait of discord emerges.
A founder of ESPN opens a window into his dysfunctional family.
Early on in this unsettling memoir, Rasmussen makes a candid statement about his oldest brother: “Bill entered this world as the perfect baby that became the perfect son, who could do no wrong. And so it would be for the rest of our parents’ lives.” The book covers a lot of ground, from Rasmussen’s boyhood baseball exploits and his serving with the Air Force in Greenland to helping get the ESPN sports network off and running. But its emotional core is his account of a toxic family to which, even from early childhood, he “felt that I didn't belong.” Rasmussen’s parents were forced into marriage after his mother got pregnant. After a daughter was stillborn, his brother Bill was born about 18 months later. He was the “savior” of the marriage, “the anointed one,” while Don, another brother Bob, and sister Vivien “were literally excess baggage.” Don is the “problem child” who spends his “whole life trying to be a part of and accepted as a part of my family.” According to Rasmussen, it was his father and Bill who teamed up to dash his dreams of playing professional baseball in an effort to “maintain [Bill’s] dominance.” The fledgling ESPN gives the family an opportunity to go into business together, but the venture dissolves in acrimony, with Don’s lawyer telling him, “I have never met anyone as nasty as Bill” and that he should try not to be too disappointed about never having a positive relationship with his family. Rasmussen concludes that “no amount of denial can cover the lifelong meanness…that I submitted to.” Rasmussen’s message is diluted by a jumbled narrative structure that hops confusingly between time periods when a linear approach would have been more effective. But the book paints a haunting picture of family dysfunction, and the author’s journey brings him to the hopeful realization that he “survived both [Bill] and Dad and their attempts to keep me down.”
Despite a muddled narrative, a haunting portrait of discord emerges.Pub Date: June 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482742022
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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