Deft but hardly easy reading. (20 b&w photographs and drawings)
A debut memoir of sexual abuse, bulimia, and other horrors.
Before Christman (English/Ball State Univ.) was born, her 13-month-old brother Ian was badly burned in the shower. Their father, consumed by guilt because he had left the toddler unsupervised, fled the family. When Ian was three, his parents very briefly reconciled, which led to Jill’s birth. Ian’s burning, the memory that defines the Christman family, is “remembered” by all four, even though their mother was away at work and Jill was not yet born. This is an account of remembrance, about memories that cannot be trusted unless they’re verified by snapshots from a family scrapbook or verbally by another person. Christman’s narrative has a dreamlike quality: it doubles back on itself, jumps from past to present, and flaunts the narrator’s unreliability. (“I think I made that up” is a repeated refrain.) Fast-forward to the author at age 19. She’s a straight-A student who can’t stop vomiting and can’t sleep. A campus counselor suggests that bulimia almost always results from sexual abuse and prescribes Prozac. Suddenly the author remembers six years of abuse at the hands of a neighbor. Is the memory true? Remembering that another man was present, she approaches him, and he verifies it. At this point, a fragile Christman becomes involved with her best friend’s brother, seemingly her first healthy relationship. One year later he’s killed in a car crash. The story then switches to the author’s uncle Mark, an alcoholic in and out of trouble with the law. This account is more linear than the first half and relies much less on family photographs. Arrested in Washington State for growing marijuana, Mark is sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Halfway through his prison sentence the author and her mother arrive to visit, only to find that Mark has bled to death, alone in his cell, just hours earlier.
Deft but hardly easy reading. (20 b&w photographs and drawings)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-8203-2444-2
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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