Daring, the author amply shows in this spirited life story, defines her.
A journalist recounts her risks, fears and triumphs.
Author of 16 books, Vanity Fair contributing editor Sheehy (Passages in Caregiving, 2010, etc.) has made a career out of examining life stages. Passages (1976) stayed on the New York Times’ best-seller list for three years, followed by Silent Passage (1993), New Passages (1995) and Understanding Men’s Passages (1999). Passages in Caregiving was motivated by the last illness of her husband, publisher Clay Felker; now, she reflects on her own transitions in a brisk, gossipy narrative complete with handsome hero (Felker), villain (Rupert Murdoch), nail-biting adventures (Bloody Sunday, for one), scores of celebrities (including interview subjects Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Bobby Kennedy and Anwar Sadat) and famous friends (Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe and David Frost). Like Wolfe, Sheehy is a practitioner of New Journalism. “We treated the protagonists of nonfiction stories like characters in a novel,” writes Sheehy. “What was their motivation?...What was it like living inside their reality?” The author reprises her own reality in three parts: the Pygmalion Years, when she was a young, ambitious journalist trying to establish her reputation and overcome editors’ prejudices about women writers, whom they commonly assigned to stories about food and style; the Passages Years, when she was a star writer for, among many other venues, Felker’s New York magazine, Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan and Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair; and the Bonus Years, focused on Felker’s cancer and Sheehy’s gradual recovery from alcohol abuse and depression following his death. After Passages, Sheehy felt she had to “justify” that success with “an academic-level study.” The result was Pathfinders (1981), about people who risked “choosing the less-traveled path.” Raising a daughter on her own, adopting a Cambodian girl after visiting a refugee camp and helping to found the Women’s Refugee Commission to advocate for survivors of genocide are among many reasons—aside from her career choices—why Sheehy, too, is one of those audacious pathfinders.
Daring, the author amply shows in this spirited life story, defines her.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062291691
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
IN THE NEWS
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
