A sensitive meditation on a woman’s difficult life.
A son bears witness to his mother’s struggles.
In a slim, tender memoir, novelist and editor Louis offers an empathetic portrait of his mother, who for 20 years lived with her abusive husband, “her life deformed and almost destroyed by misery and masculine violence.” A lively young woman who hoped to become a chef, her dream was crushed when she became pregnant at 17 and married the baby’s father, who turned out to be a drunk. Soon they had another child, but by the time she was 20, she had left him and married her second husband, Louis’ father. He, too, was an alcoholic, cruel and demanding. “Nothing could happen unless it involved my father,” Louis recalls. Over the years, she could imagine no way to leave her husband and children, but Louis could not understand her passivity. He was resentful and ashamed of her, refusing to confide his pain over being called a “faggot” by boys at school. He saw himself as a “dissident, monstrous child”—a loser, like his mother. “The first pages of this story,” he writes, “could have been called: A Son’s Struggle Not to Become a Son.” As much as he later came to sympathize with her yearning “for the right to exist as a woman,” as a boy, he treated her with condescension and cruelty. His violence, he admits with regret, was a form of “revenge against my childhood.” When his mother was 45, long after Louis had left home to attend a lycée and university, she finally threw his father out. To support herself, she became a home health aide, a satisfying job that made her proud. She met a man and joined him in Paris, where Louis was living. He depicts her transformation into a happy, attractive woman, reveling in pleasure and hard-won freedom, as a gift to them both.
A sensitive meditation on a woman’s difficult life.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60674-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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