Harrowing, creepy and compelling.
From an eight-time member of the U.S. Gymnastics Team, a cautionary tale for children, parents and gymnastics coaches alike.
The author lived her young life for the balance beam, the uneven bars and the mat. From the age of three, when she did her first cartwheel, Sey slept, breathed and ate gymnastics. (Actually, sometimes she didn’t eat.) Her determination to push her body past its limits and maintain her disconcertingly tiny build eventually led to obsessive-compulsive behavior and anorexia, but her physical (and mental) ill health didn’t keep her from competing successfully at the highest level. In 1985, at 14, she qualified for the World Championships, only to see her dream almost end when she fell from the uneven bars and broke a femur. Against all logic, Sey successfully rehabbed from an injury that would have ended many careers; she came back in 1986 to become the U.S. National Gymnastics Champion and was named the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Athlete of the Year in gymnastics. In 1990, her body and soul ravaged, she limped away from the sport, graduated from Stanford, got married, had babies and wrote a book that will scare the hell out of many an aspiring gymnast. Sey’s coverage of her competitions are sparse (“I take a deep breath. Exhale. Calm my breathing. Slow. Slow down. This is it.”), but that’s fine. It’s what goes on outside of the spotlight and inside her head that makes the book so crucial for stage mothers, malleable preteens and obsessive teenagers. It’s admirable to aspire to become a champion gymnast, but Sey’s depiction of her roller-coaster adolescence makes the point that it’s far more important to have a happy, healthy and sane childhood.
Harrowing, creepy and compelling.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-135146-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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