An honest memoir from a strong woman that will appeal to fans of Christian narratives.
Debut author Landis preaches the “good news” in her true-life story of redemption.
It was a hard-knock life in Landis’ early years. Her parents divorced when she was 8, and her mother committed suicide when she was 12. This devastating event shaped Landis’ life, sending her into a tailspin that lasted well over a decade. Despite the support of her father and stepfamily, Landis became emotionally withdrawn, feeling isolated and unloved. Thus began a downward slide into drugs, alcohol, and the wrong type of men. Landis rummages through her emotional baggage, dissecting how, in the period following her mother’s death, she wanted attention and acknowledgement yet shied away when it was offered. She lays bare all her past transgressions, tracing the path from her first tastes of alcohol to her eventual and habitual use of cocaine. Landis’ life was full of bad choices and risky behavior as she struggled with her inability to truly come to grips with her mother’s death. At one point, she was raped by a man and then went on to date him, despite her deep disgust at both him and herself. Ultimately, Landis was able to come to terms with her emotions and self-destructive behavior, attributing her redemption to Jesus Christ. Landis’ conversational narrative memoir of tragedy and triumph isn’t unique, but that doesn’t make her story any less admirable. Landis does jump among the chronology of her past, which can be confusing, and while many readers may not relate to the details of her life, the larger threads of struggle, depression, and faith are certainly familiar to many. Her relationship (or, at times, lack thereof) with Christ and religion is a consistent theme, one she finally comes to grips with in the end. However, she can sometimes push the message a little hard. As compelling as her salvation through Christ will be for some, the appeal to a broader audience may be limited, as the latter half of her memoir feels a bit like a sermon: “I wanted to carry my candle into the darkness and shine Jesus’ light for all the world.”
An honest memoir from a strong woman that will appeal to fans of Christian narratives.Pub Date: March 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1501083433
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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