Erlbaum treats her troubled subject with humanity, sensitivity and care, making this an intensely rich reading experience.
Riveting true story of a runaway and the devastating lies she tells.
In her mid-30s, Erlbaum (Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, 2006) was on the brink of happiness. Her boyfriend had just moved in, and her career as a writer was burgeoning. But she had never entirely dealt with the trauma of her past. To properly exorcise her childhood demons, she started volunteering at the New York City shelter that helped save her life when she was a teenage runaway. There she met 19-year-old Samantha Dunleavy, “a tall, rangy white girl with a shaggy mop of brown hair” who told stories about traveling the country with her meth-cooking father and junkie mother, who forced her daughter to hustle when money was tight. Sam had amazing talents: She wrote metered poetry, made casual references to astrophysics and could hold intelligent conversations about books and philosophers. Erlbaum fell in love with this “junkie savant.” Despite all the rules—“No favorites. And no buying them stuff,” the counselors warned—she served as Sam’s coolheaded mentor, steady through desperate phone calls and late-night pleas. Erlbaum was there by Sam’s side when the accident-prone girl wound up in the hospital: a broken wrist, then sepsis, then the psych ward, rehab, pneumonia, meningitis and a slew of subsequent medical problems. Soon, the force of Sam’s neediness began to overwhelm Erlbaum’s life; even her wedding plans were shadowed by the specter of her young friend’s life-threatening ailments. Desperate to find Sam appropriate medical help, the author uncovered a jaw-dropping secret that turned everything preceding its discovery into one giant question mark. What started out as a memoir becomes a disturbing, fascinating detective story.
Erlbaum treats her troubled subject with humanity, sensitivity and care, making this an intensely rich reading experience.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7457-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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