For a more in-depth, gripping story of living with autism, check out John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye: My Life with...
Slight but inspiring book about four minutes and 19 seconds in basketball that touched millions of lives.
In the weeks following February 15, 2006, you couldn’t turn on SportsCenter or a random TV-news magazine without seeing video clips of blonde, slender, smiling high-schooler Jason “J-Mac” McElwain sinking one bucket after another. Basketball-obsessed teenager McElwain, the autistic manager of the Greece Athena Trojans, got his chance to play on the final day of his team’s season, with less than five minutes left in the game. Coach Jim Johnson led Jason to the scorer’s table, and the sympathetic crowd went nuts. Most everybody in the stands would have been happy if McElwain made even a free throw, but he had bigger goals. He kept hurling up a shot virtually every time he got the ball. And they kept going in—to the tune of 20 points, 18 of which came from three-pointers. Next thing you know, the affable, unflappable Jason is doing the talk-show circuit, charming everyone within viewing range. As an inspirational and family-aid tool, his memoir is pitch-perfect. McElwain lucidly explains how he survived and ultimately thrived with autism, and the interjections by friends and family are properly gushing and moving. As a piece of literature, it suffers from the problem inherent in books written by a subject who hasn’t lived a long or rich life: lots of filler.
For a more in-depth, gripping story of living with autism, check out John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s (2007). But if you need a dose of positivity with a sprinkle of Rocky, you could do a lot worse than J-Mac.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-451-22301-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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