An honest, informative, and uplifting memoir.
A journalist and children's book author tells the story of the golden retriever that changed her disabled son’s life.
Shortly after they married in the late 1990s, Winokur (Nuzzle: Love Between a Boy and His Service Dog, 2011, etc.) and her husband, Harvey, realized they could not have children. Unwilling to wait for an American-born child, they adopted two infants from Russia, a girl and a boy they named Morasha and Iyal. For the first year, they experienced “a parenting honeymoon.” Then Winokur began to notice that Iyal’s development lagged behind his sister’s. At first she thought he had ADD or ADHD, but Iyal’s frenzied behavior, along with the visible disconnect “between his brain and sensory receptors,” suggested a far more serious problem. A doctor finally diagnosed him with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. As the boy grew older, his behaviors became increasingly extreme. Never knowing when Iyal would turn into “a Mini-Me of the Incredible Hulk” and outraged at the many ways other children tried to abuse him, Winokur struggled with anxiety and depression while her marriage crumbled around her. “Betting on hope,” she sought help from 4 Paws, a service that trains dogs to assist special needs children. The organization sent the family a young golden retriever named Chancer. Harvey was deeply skeptical; despite a loving personality, Chancer made mistakes, including chewing up a TV remote control and Harvey’s cellphone. Yet from the moment Chancer met Iyal, the dog’s gentle presence immediately helped the boy begin to find calm from the “chemical storm[s]” that caused him to hallucinate and suffer from extreme sensitivity to smells and touch. The story of how Chancer helped the Winokurs and their son heal and grow closer is poignant and heartwarming. But what makes the book especially important is the frank way the author illuminates an underdiscussed disorder that affects as many as one child in 20 in the United States.
An honest, informative, and uplifting memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4290-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Harbor Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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.
