For self-help fans and seekers of self-empowerment, this is an inspiring memoir with tips for overcoming and maybe...
An inspirational speaker and yoga instructor shares her life story along with motivational tips and exercises from her popular workshops.
Over the past several years, Pastiloff has built an abundant international following for her On Being Human workshops, inspiring retreat gatherings in which she offers a fusion of yoga movement, motivational writing, and communal sharing. In her debut memoir, she digs into the significant life events that led her to this unusual entrepreneurial opportunity. She reflects on childhood and family dynamics, personal losses, past boyfriends, her struggles with depression and increasing hearing loss, and day-to-day encounters while waitressing at a restaurant in Los Angeles. Though her career steps may seem unremarkable on the surface, the author stresses her evolving talent for remaining receptive and present throughout these experiences, enabling her to recognize beautiful moments as they occur. “It was there at the restaurant that I first began to pay attention to the beauty, because if I hadn’t, I would surely have killed myself,” she writes. “The landscape of self-loathing I traversed was so treacherous that the only thing that could have possibly saved me were those moments of beauty I hunted—accidentally at first, and then deliberately, and in earnest.” In recounting her stories and her various emotional states, Pastiloff’s prose is occasionally overwrought. Though her followers will surely relate to most of the author’s stories, newcomers may find her style heavy-handed. Eventually, after training to become a yoga instructor, Pastiloff began to find her calling, and elements of her platform emerged. At this midway point in the text, the narrative gains more energy and substance. Though still reliant on feel-good aphorisms—chapter headings include “Embracing Change” and “Make Room for the Possible and the Impossible”—the author ultimately clearly conveys her authentic intentions. By the end, many readers will admire her tenacity and open-hearted mission.
For self-help fans and seekers of self-empowerment, this is an inspiring memoir with tips for overcoming and maybe prospering from the chaotic or disappointing elements that comprise an imperfect life.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4356-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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