by Janine Shepherd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2016
An inspirational but thin account of an athlete's tragic accident and the long road she traveled to reach a different kind...
An athlete's memoir about her ability to overcome personal tragedy and reinvent her life.
In 1986, Shepherd (On My Own Two Feet, 2007, etc.), a cross-country skier who was expected to represent her native Australia in the 1988 Olympics, was out on a bike ride with friends when a truck hit her. Her body was crushed: broken back and neck, five broken ribs, broken bones in her feet, contusions to her kidneys, hip and leg muscles torn from bones, extensive lacerations, and massive internal bleeding. Initially, her doctors weren't sure she'd survive. In lengthy detail, Shepherd shares how she spent the next six months in the hospital and in rehab, undergoing treatments and surgeries for her injuries, which left her with permanent disabilities that wiped out any chance of returning to elite athlete status. She tried returning to college but eventually found a new direction for her life in learning how to fly. She explains how she tackled the task of getting her pilot's license, using the same intensity of concentration and will she had used to train for competitive skiing events. From there, the memoir makes some rapid leaps in time as Shepherd chronicles her involvement with a fellow pilot; the births of her children; writing a book about her accident, which was made into a movie; becoming a TED talk speaker; and the dissolution of her marriage. The author places great emphasis on the first few years immediately following the accident that so drastically changed the trajectory of her life, but much of the material is similar to what she already chronicled in previous memoirs. Shepherd’s tenacity and determination are evident throughout the book, and her recovery is remarkable, but the narrative could have used more depth and introspection.
An inspirational but thin account of an athlete's tragic accident and the long road she traveled to reach a different kind of fulfilling life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62203-710-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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