A riveting, warts-and-all depiction of a lost soul found.
Wry, self-deprecating memoirist King (Parched, 2005) explores her conversion to Catholicism.
The author should have had everything she could want. After 20 years on the bottle, she was finally sober, with “a tremendous sense of having been delivered from the brink.” She’d found a decent man, though her marriage felt stale. She was a newly minted lawyer—too bad she hated her dead-end job. In short, she was primed for a spiritual experience. One day she attended mass at a nearby Catholic church. To her surprise, she found that at St. Basil’s she “felt Christ in the core of my being.” Jesus did not want people to suffer more, she discovered; rather, he acknowledged the profound suffering in every human life. King ultimately joined the church—and started sleeping with a glow-in-the-dark rosary—but she didn’t become perfect. Indeed, she spends a lot of time airing her faults: her tendency to hoard money, her less-than-perfect relationship with her sister, her petty resentment of her husband’s devotion to Buddhist meditation, her boundless need for affirmation. Her book also has some faults, in particular a chapter about the Church’s views on gender roles and premarital sex that belongs in another, less personal text. Overall, however, this is funny, sharp stuff laced with real insight, such as King’s insistence that when tragedies like Katrina occur, most of the time the right question is “not where was God, but where was I?” Her journey to Catholicism was accompanied by another journey—she quit her law firm and began to write. So this is really the story of two callings—to faith, and to a life’s work—and most writers will relate to King’s delightfully over-the-top discussions of her chosen profession’s terrors.
A riveting, warts-and-all depiction of a lost soul found.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01863-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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