Boldly goes where many Amish chronicles fear to tread: the exodus of members seeking an unencumbered lifestyle.
An affecting memoir from a former Old Order Amish member who abandoned his structured family life for autonomy in the free world.
Wagler, the 9th of 11 children, recalls his family settling in the “somewhat progressive” southwestern Canadian township of Aylmer in the 1960s. They enjoyed running water on the farm, unlike other more conservative Amish collectives bound by what Wagler calls the “inordinate fussing” of horse-and-buggy travel, forbidden electric and telephone service, home-sewn dresses for women and beards for men. His farm years are fondly and unhurriedly conveyed in ponderous reflection as Wagler admits to rarely ever being bored growing up (three-hour church services were the only exception). As his teenage years hit, resistance to the rigid Amish rules simmered while the family uprooted themselves to a burgeoning Amish community in Bloomfield, Iowa. There, Wagler experimented with the worldly temptations of the outward “English society” during his traditional adolescent “Rumspringa” period, but, at 17, the itch of independence became a calling he couldn’t deny or resist. Late one night, armed with a duffel bag and $150, he left home. In engrossing, straightforward prose, the author passionately describes the ensuing five years he spent rationalizing his desire to join the outside world while he grappled with the tidal pull back to familial safety and stability. This created an exasperating cycle of secretive departures and humbling homecomings; even an attempt at love was dashed in favor of fleeing once again. The collective shunning by the Amish church proved a double-edged sword for the author; while sorrowful, it finally brought necessary closure to Wagler’s youthful wanderings, yet taught him how to “leave and not be lost.”
Boldly goes where many Amish chronicles fear to tread: the exodus of members seeking an unencumbered lifestyle.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3936-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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
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
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