Next book

FIELDS OF GRACE

FAITH, FRIENDSHIP, AND THE DAY I NEARLY LOST EVERYTHING

A tender, Christian-based memoir of love and friendship.

One young woman's struggle with her faith.

As Luce discovered, being the daughter of the well-known youth evangelist and co-founder of Teen Mania Ministries, Ron Luce, was no small task, especially as she grew into her teens and began to question her faith in God. With the help of Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; co-author: The Woman Who Wasn't There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception, 2012, etc.), Luce delves into the complex world of personal faith, of growing up hearing one strict version of the Bible while feeling and believing that other variations of Christianity were possible, versions that tolerated same-sex marriage, drinking alcohol and the right to question religious texts. Although she dearly loved her father and enjoyed their long talks on car rides and mission trips, she didn’t always support his rhetoric. "Papa had come to his own conclusions about God and the church, and I was forming my own,” she writes. “We didn’t have to agree. However it all shook out I would respect Papa's beliefs, and I hoped that he would respect me for searching so long and hard to find mine." Confused and conflicted, Luce relied on her two best friends, Austin and Garrett, for emotional, physical and spiritual support. Then her world was devastated when the small plane she was traveling in with these two friends and two others crashed, killing everyone onboard except Luce. What followed was physical trauma as well as the extreme guilt and anguish she felt at being the sole survivor. After months of recovery, Luce discovered the answers to the questions for which she had been searching for so long.

A tender, Christian-based memoir of love and friendship.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4767-2960-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 62


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Next book

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 62


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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

Close Quickview