A charming, insightful account.
In her debut memoir, Bines recounts her volatile marriage while pondering the many influences that bound her to her alcoholic husband for so many years.
Bines grew up in a passionate if dysfunctional French Canadian home. Her mother, a glamorous but unstable woman, was a portrait in extremes who modeled the sort of temperamental alcoholic Bines would later marry. Her father, a mild-mannered man, attempted to keep peace at all costs. Bines qualified as a teacher at a young age and saved money to travel extensively with female friends, immersing herself in other cultures and making rounds on the party circuit. Coming of age in the 1960s, Bines cast aside her family’s traditional Catholic mores to explore her sexuality. She dated a series of decent, unremarkable young men before falling for Dick, who was wild and unpredictable, with a penchant for partying and dangerous pranks. Soon she and Dick married and became parents, and after a series of humiliating incidents and brushes with the law (Dick passed out in his dessert plate after dinner with the boss and drunkenly demolished a ticket booth after a dispute with a parking attendant), Bines realized she married a troubled alcoholic. The story begins in medias res, in a lightning quick series of domestic disputes that took place around the time of Bines’ divorce from Dick. The intensity of these reported conversations, coupled with a total lack of context, is initially confusing. As Bines goes on to describe her upbringing in gloriously vivid detail, however, showing how she gained her independence early in life only to suppress it once more in marriage, she provides much more captivating, fluid reading. Bines’ frank conversational style is both humorous and engaging, as when she tells of her halfhearted attempts to join the swinging ’70s with a game of strip poker: “I started crying….One more hand and I was down to my top and quit. I had a hissy fit and walked out of the room and locked myself in the bathroom.”
A charming, insightful account.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499024661
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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