A compelling continuation of Williams's determined struggle to break free from autism. Perhaps even more than her best-selling Nobody Nowhere (1992), this journal reveals the vision and courage of the author. It picks up where the earlier volume left off, with the completion of the first manuscript and its submission to a publisher. Then, Williams was heading back home from London to Australia, newly aware of a self. But with the bite of the apple of awareness, she was more emotionally vulnerable than ever, unprotected by the ritualistic noises and movements typical of autism and determined not to call on the false selves that helped her function in the world ``out there.'' With the help of an educational psychologist and a couple who began as her landlords and ended as loving counselors, and with the help also of colleagues and her students, she fought to move beyond the still detached world in which she lived. She had no comprehension of what other people were feeling, since she could not admit feeling herself. Sensitive to noise, bright lights and supersensitive to touch, she was sometimes overwhelmed by sensation, at which time the ``meaning dropped out of words.'' She heard, but did not comprehend, only hoping that a speaker's words would be stored somewhere in her memory so she could retrieve and understand them later. College, teaching, and a worldwide book tour added pressure, but Williams's amazing determination enabled her to break through bouts of the ``Big Black Nothingness''—a void of sensation and experience—to feel anger, pain, and pleasure. Descriptions of feelings at times take on the fuzzy terms of New Agespeak, but discovering as an adult what most of us experience from birth must overwhelm the power of metaphor. A poignant sequel to Williams's ongoing adventure, her experiences here more closely shadowing the emotional struggles of non-autistic adults.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2287-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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