A frank, earnest memoir of the difficulties of parenthood.
Morgan recounts her struggles to mother a troubled man in this debut mental health memoir.
As a single mother of an adolescent boy, Morgan reminded herself to pay close attention, knowing Dylan—like all sons—would change as he grew older. It wasn’t until June of 2011—when the then-23-year-old Dylan was arrested for firing an illegal gun after a party and was then also found to be growing marijuana in his apartment—that she realized just how far he had drifted from the boy she knew. Morgan, a college professor, was at first horrified by the impending gossip sure to spread through the small conservative Kentucky town, but she began to consider the warning signs: Dylan’s struggles with bipolar disorder, his DUIs, his refusal to find a job. After some cajoling, Dylan agreed to enter a Drug Court program that would help him avoid his three felony charges, though he only had one shot. Any mistakes would have landed him in jail. To ensure that Dylan completed the program, Morgan realized she needed to change strategies—to be more understanding of her son’s mental health and addiction problems, while not being too lenient. Morgan was forced to also consider her own co-dependency and find a path through the minefield of motherhood to save both her son and herself. Morgan’s prose is ruminative and laden with imagistic language: “For a long time, while my son was very young, I thought he was a smaller version of Attila the Hun. I thought he had only three settings on his dial: brash, bold, and barbarian.” Dylan is a difficult, often infuriating figure, and Morgan confronts his issues (and her own) with candid, sometimes-painful self-awareness. Her accounts of the justice system and rehabilitation are illuminating, and while the details sometimes overwhelm, the reading experience manages to capture the immense frustration that she (and others) no doubt felt. If memoirs exist to depict how some navigate situations that others can’t imagine, this one is a great success.
A frank, earnest memoir of the difficulties of parenthood.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-644-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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