A rewarding account of a courtroom career that delivers bold and elegant writing.
A retired African American federal judge recalls his life’s work and battle with depression in this debut memoir.
In 1982, Kennedy was 32 years old and serving as a judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. It was at this point in his life he was first diagnosed with major depressive disorder. The symptoms were disabling; he describes his “greatly diminished ability to concentrate and communicate, orally and in writing, loss of confidence, and perceived impaired judgment.” These symptoms would force the author to retire from his role in 2011, which he recalls as one of the saddest days of his life. This memoir recounts Kennedy’s childhood, growing up first in Columbia, South Carolina, where he and his family experienced brutal racism, before moving north to Washington, D.C., as part of the “great migration in the 1950s and 1960s of black families out of the South to the North to escape oppression.” The author describes his ascension to the role of federal judge, having graduated from Princeton and attended Harvard Law School. He also discusses notable cases, including key rulings regarding Guantánamo Bay. Kennedy was urged to write a memoir by his therapist as a way of confronting negative impulses. The author notes: “The hope was that I might realize that I am not a disappointment or a failure, feelings that periodically infused my psyche for years, particularly when I was in the grip of depression.” Kennedy’s writing possesses a candidness and clarity of expression even when discussing distressing subjects, such as undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation: “The device administering the magnetic pulses caused excruciating pain, like someone repeatedly striking my head with a wooden mallet.” Recollections of an inspirational career—the author was the youngest federal judicial officer ever appointed—combined with a lucid account of experiencing mental illness, elevate the autobiography beyond that of an exercise in personal catharsis. This book has something to offer readers with an interest in the American judicial system, those facing depression, and even tennis fans—Kennedy reveals how “with the ability to play pain-free tennis, the long nightmare of depression started to lift.” The author could perhaps have described in even greater detail his approach to beating mental illness, but this is an uplifting success story nonetheless.
A rewarding account of a courtroom career that delivers bold and elegant writing.Pub Date: April 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6374-9
Page Count: 172
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2019
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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