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
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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