A lost childhood reclaimed in profound triumph, and with the promise of a sequel to match.
A searing, soaring memoir of one girl’s complicated and almost unbelievable childhood.
Jennifer Lauck’s mother died in the fall of 1970, leaving Jennifer’s father to look after her and her brother B.J. on his own. With dizzying speed, shock after shock followed this initial tragedy. Out of frustration, B.J. disclosed the secret of Jennifer’s adoption, which her father confirmed. Soon he introduced his two children to Deb, the materialistic, impractical woman he had apparently been seeing since before his wife’s death; eventually he and Deb (who had three children from an earlier marriage) wed. An emotional tug-of-war ensued between the Lauck children and their surrogate mother, and, during her stay at a summer camp, Jennifer was sexually molested by one of the male counselors. Not long afterward, her father suffered a fatal cardiac arrest, leaving Deb in charge of all five kids. Guided by the High Early Seventies idealism of the commune-like Freedom Church, Deb and the kids moved to northern California in a brief attempt at living off the land near Stanford University, before returning south in defeat. On the brink of losing total control, Deb enrolled Jennifer, who was 11, in a program sponsored by her “church” that allowed her to live under the supervision of a married couple near downtown Los Angeles; she was expected to work for her room and board there, while simultaneously seeing herself through school. The story ends with rescue: some Lauck relatives from Nevada who happened to be visiting Los Angeles looked up the kids, discovered their plight, and claimed custody. This hairpin-curve existence is narrated entirely from a young girl’s viewpoint, and Lauck’s literary achievements—voice, characterization, pacing—are as extraordinary as those of Frank McCourt and Dave Eggers, if not more so.
A lost childhood reclaimed in profound triumph, and with the promise of a sequel to match.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-04255-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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