An elegiac testament to friendship, love and survival.
An original, deeply moving memoir about how a man's quest to understand the supernatural led him to confront his own haunted past.
Writer and NPR executive Nuzum was a young teenager growing up in Ohio when he encountered his first ghost, a little girl in a blue dress who appeared to him in his dreams. As he grew up, the author became convinced that the girl “was a harbinger of my own self-destruction.” Perhaps she was. By the time Nuzum was 18, he was a “doped-up, undependable, unpredictable mess” who actively courted suicide. His bizarre, sometimes violent behavior eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward. When medical intervention failed, a beautiful and unconventional friend named Laura helped pull him back from the brink. But as he healed, their complex, enigmatic relationship faltered; soon he lost track of her altogether. Then, during his first year back at college, he received word that Laura had died after getting hit by a car. Although Nuzum moved on with his life, he remained permanently marked by his experiences. Closed doors still frightened him because they could “have ghosts hiding behind them.” Determined to confront his fears, he began investigating famous haunted places across America. His occasionally humorous encounters with the spirit world did nothing to cure his phobia, but they did push him into a reckoning with his past and with the ghost of Laura.
An elegiac testament to friendship, love and survival.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34243-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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
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