A memoir of an admirable, faith-based life, but one that ultimately provides little insight into its author.
Waken (My Home Sweet Home: Surviving an Abusive Relationship, 2013) offers a memoir about how unshakable faith carried her through decades of joy and family turmoil.
Following the death of her abusive husband, the author navigates life as a single mother with four children. Waken documents her life in close detail from the early 1960s through the first decade of the new millennium, crediting her Christian faith with giving her the strength to endure challenges great and small—including supporting her family, her son’s near-fatal car accident when he was 17, and moving from Michigan to Alaska at the age of 55. She gives equal weight to life-changing and mundane moments of her life, often pausing to reflect on small blessings: “It is my home sweet home, no matter how humble. I am thankful for a job so I can afford a place to live and have food to eat. Thank you, Lord, You have provided for me and my family for many years.” It’s easy to admire Waken’s humility and her gumption; her memoir details her grace under pressure and her frequent travels to help her family members through myriad struggles. However, the cast of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews and friends who pop in and out of Waken’s story quickly start to blend together. The book often reads more like a personal journal than a memoir, and provides little scene-setting or characterization. Waken frequently mentions the beauty of her beloved Alaska, but provides few descriptive details to place readers there. Likewise, although the book ends with a tragic loss, Waken dedicates more time to outlining the relevant facts of the event than exploring her feelings about the loss and its impact. The book will likely appeal primarily to a Christian audience, who may be more willing to overlook some of its narrative flaws.
A memoir of an admirable, faith-based life, but one that ultimately provides little insight into its author.Pub Date: July 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483662770
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
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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