Fans of this eloquent and introspective author will welcome this innermost chronicle of his history, passions, and the keys...
A distinguished psychotherapist reflects on his life and fulfilling career.
After a prolific string of publications including fiction, nonfiction, and collections of case files from his practice, Yalom (Emeritus, Psychiatry/Stanford Univ.; Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy, 2015, etc.) turns his perspective inward. Braided throughout client profiles are colorfully drawn anecdotes of his younger days as a self-proclaimed “disturber of the peace” whose disrespect and rebelliousness were always assigned primary blame for any unrest within the family household, including his father’s chest pain. Yet these are characteristics he regrets now, as an adult, as well as not being able to connect more emotionally with his frugal immigrant parents before time ran out. Valiantly leaving home for medical school meant seriousness and discipline, both of which Yalom mastered, even while making room for love. In smoothly conversational prose, the author ruminates on anger, his Jewish identity and the “ruins of my own religious education,” the “encounter groups” of the 1960s, the evolution of his relationship with wife Marilyn, a stint in the Army, international sojourns, and his psychiatry practice, which eventually landed him at Stanford. In the most touching chapters, Yalom chronicles how he has wrestled with the integrative role that death plays in the everyday lives of his patients (as well as with his own mortality). At 86, the author, an avid bicycler and poker enthusiast, still writes daily and sees patients in his San Francisco apartment. The author believes their intimate histories affect how he personally views his present life and memorializes his past, a notion that fortifies much of this fecund memoir. “My clients’ memories more often trigger my own,” he writes, “my work on their future calls upon and disturbs my past, and I find myself reconsidering my own story.”
Fans of this eloquent and introspective author will welcome this innermost chronicle of his history, passions, and the keys to unlocking a fruitful life.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09889-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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