A brutal, frightening, but ultimately hopeful story of adoption.
Kuehnel’s debut memoir tells of a young boy changing countries, changing families, and enduring nearly as much hardship as a life can hold.
In 1974, when he was 8 years old, Kuehnel’s mother abandoned him and his younger brothers on the streets of Quezon City in the Philippines. He writes that he “felt like a disposable diaper, discarded when soiled.” He was soon sent to an orphanage, where he and his brothers waited by the curb outside each day until, eventually, they gave up hope. Their father came to visit early on, only to leave again and never return; they also went to see their mother’s new family, who sent them away. They later moved to a rougher orphanage where “After a while, our stomachs learned not to rumble, but nothing eased the constant ache.” The bullying there was constant, and they endured beatings by “house parents”; their only toys were made of trash, and their only bath was an open sewer. The author eventually escaped to the streets, but “to survive, I had to rely on the half-eaten, half-rotten food that people threw away.” Eventually, he was lucky enough to find adoptive parents in America who cared for him. However, he still had to deal with years of culture shock and lost hope. Even now, after obtaining a doctorate and founding a charitable organization, Kuehnel still feels “alone even when…surrounded by friends and family.” By this exceptionally touching memoir’s end, readers will understand the reasons behind his feelings of solitude and marvel at his life’s burdens. He clearly paints the disturbing details of his early life in run-down institutions and on the streets. Kuehnel knows that there’s no such thing as an entirely happy ending, and he respects his readers too much to offer one. But he does show cautious optimism in the book’s final pages and a faith in mankind that readers won’t be able to help but admire.
A brutal, frightening, but ultimately hopeful story of adoption.Pub Date: July 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4904-4913-5
Page Count: 217
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
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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