A 9/11 widow recounts how she grieved for her husband yet eventually found love again.
“Time heals all wounds. Boy did I despise that cliché,” writes debut memoirist Trulson about the process of learning to accept her husband’s death and honor his memory while embarking on an unexpected romantic relationship. Doug Gardner, an executive broker, devoted husband and father of two, was one of the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed in the Twin Towers, an incident that his wife reconstructs with painful acuity. In an instant, her life of family outings, charity events and emotional stability fell away, leaving a barrage of funerals, media saturation and agonizing reminders of happier times. Trulson excels at portraying both her own despair over Doug’s sudden death and her frustration with how quickly and callously American politicians and news outlets capitalized on the tragedy for their own gains. Her sojourn in “Widowville” threatened to reduce her to a political bargaining chip and Manhattan conversation piece, roles that she has refused to embrace. Ironically, the narrative loses momentum when she begins dating Derek Trulson (now her husband), after asserting to friends and family that she would never remarry. The author does get some mileage out of contrasting her metropolitan Jewish background against her second husband’s rugged Pacific Northwestern upbringing, but a little of this banter goes a long way. While no reader would begrudge her another chance at love, the second half of the book lapses into platitudes about domestic bliss and perfect new in-laws, passages that become grating, especially after the grim humor and sharp observations of the first half of the book. Uneven, but in its stronger moments, the book provides trenchant insights into one woman’s resilience and makes a respectable entry in the burgeoning field of 9/11 widow memoirs.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2142-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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