A heartfelt testament to the power of positive thinking and a primer for readers considering open-water scuba certification.
A debut memoir celebrates the author’s determination not to be limited by her physical disability.
Myrick was born with “a congenital defect of the left arm called Radial Hemimelia…where the arm bone (radius) is considerably shortened.” Despite this, she “actually led a somewhat ‘normal’ life,” doing everything her “siblings did—playing dodge ball, softball, and jacks.” Growing up in a family that “saw me, not my hand” enabled the author to develop a can-do attitude and to persevere even when she feared death, as when she started learning to swim. Her interest in diving was born when she watched a scuba show on TV: She “was mesmerized” by the “explosion of color…Bright yellow, pink and blue fish were everywhere.” Before long, she was taking her first diving lessons. Then, for her certification dives, she and her husband, James, chose Divetech at the Cobalt Coast Resort in Grand Cayman, known for its tranquil, clear waters. But choppy seas with strong undercurrents were the order of the day. She failed her first try at certification, but she persisted, succeeding on her second attempt. In prose that is often searing, she describes being constantly worried about how people perceived her. As a child, she often asked “God to make people stop staring” at her hand. The opening chapter dream sequence during her flight to Grand Cayman provides a backdrop for her love and terror of the sea: Moving “timidly into the warm water, wading ankle deep, the water seems to beckon me,” and when it “is just below my knees, my heart starts to race; I can hear pounding in my ears and I can hardly breathe.” Readers who are interested in scuba diving should appreciate Myrick’s straightforward descriptions of the equipment and the step-by-step skills needed for open-water diving certification: “You wear the mask over your eyes and nose to provide an air pocket for better vision and equalization of pressure”; “we began switching from the snorkel to the second-stage regulator, lifting the inflator hose, releasing air from the BCD, exhaling.”
A heartfelt testament to the power of positive thinking and a primer for readers considering open-water scuba certification.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9600839-0-9
Page Count: 89
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
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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