An unremarkable double memoir.
Side-by-side versions of an evolving parent-child relationship whose ups and downs are recounted in overstatement and clichés.
First-time authors Joan, who works in the children’s entertainment business, and daughter Maddy, 22 but still growing up, give often conflicting versions of the same events. Both accounts read as though they were being told aloud to a friend. Joan’s style is effusive and her vocabulary limited; she describes her daughter as “incredibly social” and some good friends as “absolutely hilarious.” Maddy is more matter-of-fact, but just what the facts are depends on who’s telling the story. There are two versions of a grocery store candy-stealing episode when Maddy was eight (not long after her parents divorced), of her learning problems in elementary school and of a disturbing incident that began when Joan ejected Maddy and some other misbehaving children from her car, obliging them to find their way home across the city. Teenaged Maddy sabotaged her mother’s relationship with a man identified only as “Bike Guy,” and then with another, “Tree Guy.” Her educational difficulties continued, but eventually she graduated from Taddle Creek, an alternative high school with 20 students run by a man named Harvey Rainbow. More serious problems arose when Maddy was 19 and learned that the man she was dating was HIV-positive and had infected several other girls. While that episode had a happy ending, major troubles lay ahead. Assuming that her mothering days were coming to an end, Joan decided to leave Canada for southern California to start a new life alone. When her 20-year-old daughter unexpectedly came along, she found herself back in mothering mode, as Maddy made a mess of her life with drinking and drugs. Their tale ends with Joan adoring and admiring her “simply amazing” daughter and with Maddy admitting her drug use and asserting her love for her mother.
An unremarkable double memoir.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1839-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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