Many questions about the exact nature of Wortmann’s OCD rituals remain elusive, but his inspiring victories after successful...
Uneven but ultimately satisfying memoir of a young author’s OCD.
Growing up in Massachusetts, comic-book fan and video-game aficionado Wortmann managed to keep his undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder relatively in check. That all changed, however, after high school when the pressures of higher education and encroaching adulthood conspired to undermine his efforts at health and happiness. Trapped in the confines of an increasingly tormented brain, the author spent his early days at Swarthmore College drinking too much and carrying on an ill-advised relationship with an equally disturbed young woman. He would not emerge from the OCD wilderness without a prolonged stay at a mental-health facility specializing in OCD. Wortmann writes eloquently about his battles with OCD, constructing dense, dramatic prose to convey even the tiniest observations. He goes on at length, for example, about the social dynamics of Swarthmore and even the divergent personalities of his beloved childhood pets. Yet there remains a certain distance attributable to the overly complex and self-indulgent narrative. Although evident, Wortmann's anguish consistently takes a backseat to the next well-crafted (overbaked?) sentence. The author has a background in comedy, which could explain the exactitude of his narrative, a possible comedic counterpoint to the distressing chaos of the subject matter. What’s lacking is a more vivid portrayal of Wortmann’s particular brand of OCD. Excessive hand-washing and compulsive checking are easy to depict. “Pure-O” compulsions—unseen rituals performed in the mind to fend off unwanted thoughts—are a lot tougher to relate. Unfortunately, readers end up with a far greater understanding of Swarthmore’s dating scene than the author’s unique type of disorder.
Many questions about the exact nature of Wortmann’s OCD rituals remain elusive, but his inspiring victories after successful treatment ring true.Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-62210-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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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