An affectionate, well-meaning memoir of how a psychiatrist gained empathy through his family’s troubled lives.
A psychiatrist reflects on his childhood and the family members who struggled with mental health issues.
In this sympathetic memoir, psychiatrist Hallowell (CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD, 2006, etc.) creates a memorable portrait of his younger self in relation to the colorful and often troubled family members who influenced his personal and professional development, several of whom dealt with alcoholism and/or mental illness, including both his parents and one of his brothers. A defining event of his early childhood occurred after his parents divorced and his mother remarried a charming but unstable man who had a violent drinking problem that surfaced after they moved from their familiar Cape Cod home to North Carolina. Though traumatized by this disruption within his family, Hallowell had the good fortune and family means to attend private boarding schools, where he excelled in his studies and expanded his social life. Through continued effort, he went on to attend medical school. In the latter portion of the narrative, the author touches on his internships and eventual practice, devoting much attention to stories of his patients. For the most part, Hallowell is a generous and lively storyteller, and he shares inspiring insights into his family and the patients he has treated. Yet he is surprisingly less forthcoming about tackling his own issues or feelings. “The price I paid is that I carry a lot of sadness inside me,” he writes. “But that also gives me a deeper understanding of other people’s sadness that lectures and books can’t provide.” His narrative lacks a driving momentum or evolving tension to grab readers’ imaginations. Compared to other writers whose memoirs address similar issues of familial dysfunction—Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff come to mind—Hallowell’s approach feels passive. He has a warm, reassuring voice, but readers may feel that there wasn’t enough at stake.
An affectionate, well-meaning memoir of how a psychiatrist gained empathy through his family’s troubled lives.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-858-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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