Eye-opening and courageous.
Independent Fundamentalist Mormon husband Darger and his three “sister wives” offer a candid, often engaging account of how and why they chose to enter into an outlawed form of marriage.
Best known as the inspiration for the controversial HBO series Big Love, all four Dargers were products of successful polygamist marriages. “[O]ur childhoods were great,” they write, “and were a big factor in our decision to pursue the same family structure in our own lives.” Darger met his first two wives, Vicki and her cousin Alina, when the three of them were preteens, but serious dating did not begin until high school. At that point, Darger was at the center of what he admits was “an unusual love story, even within the Fundamentalist Mormon culture.” With the blessing of all but one father, he began courting both Vicki and Alina, who in turn worked on solidifying the personal relationship they had with each other. After 18 months, the three married and began their lives together. Ten years later, in 2000, the trio welcomed a third wife, Vicki’s sister Valerie (who had left another, unsuccessful polygamist marriage), into their family. The tragic death of Alina’s newly born child in 2001 brought unwanted legal and media scrutiny into their lives, but rather than destroy the family, it “started [them] on the road to activism to fight anti-polygamy biases.” The Dargers do not evangelize for what they admit is a challenging lifestyle. Rather, with admirable honesty and dignity, they ask readers to respect their choice to live by the tenets of their faith.
Eye-opening and courageous.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-207404-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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