An honest, unsparing look at the deadly erosion of self-worth.
Journalist Latus’s straight-shooting memoir about dutiful Catholic sisters growing up in 1970s Michigan dilates into a haunting story of abuse at the hands of the men in their lives.
In 2002, the author picked up the phone to learn that her younger sister was missing and the prime suspect was Amy’s freeloading ex-con boyfriend. In the ensuing chapters about the sisters’ childhood and youth, Latus attempts to figure what went wrong in the relationships both women endured with the men they loved. Clues begin to center around their father, an insurance salesman who is both seductive and hypercritical. On the one hand, when Janine is a girl, he routinely tells her how flat-chested she is, what a stupid laugh she has. On the other, he “feels her up” with his eyes and praises her sexy legs. Her mother remains passive while the girls’ Catholic religious teaching hammers home the message that women are seductresses and men have uncontrollable urges. Obviously, the only way for someone as pathetic as Janine to get men’s approval is by sleeping with them; she grows into a rebellious, fairly promiscuous, academic dilettante. Janine graduates and marries her lover (after he gets a divorce). Stuck at home, much younger Amy marries early, gains weight and lets her education languish. But she eventually gets a divorce, builds a career as a pricing analyst and starts over. Then she meets a dangerous, two-timing criminal who’s obviously bad news—but he keeps telling Amy he loves her. Just as the author finds the courage to turn around her life, Amy dies. And Dad’s still clueless, telling suggestive stories about his daughter at the memorial service. Latus writes here to save the lives of women like her sister and herself, so desperate for love that they’ll pay any price for it.
An honest, unsparing look at the deadly erosion of self-worth.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9653-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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