A new, engaging, and informative perspective that redefines what “normal” should really mean.
A challenge to rethink “normal.”
When Mooney (The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal, 2007, etc.) was a child, he was “diagnosed with multiple language-based disabilities and attention deficit disorder. When the educational psychologist broke the news to my mom and me, it was as if someone had died.” For years after, the author struggled to conform to whatever concept of “normal” he thought would help him fit in and stop feeling like a “weird kid.” In this sometimes-humorous and thought-provoking analysis of his childhood, adolescence, and college years, Mooney shares what it was like to be different from the norm, which he astutely points out “is a false standard for human value.” He provides an extensive history of how the idea of normal evolved, giving readers an eye-opening look at the standards we are often forced to live with, whether we know it or not—and whether we have learning disabilities, physical and/or mental disabilities, or in some other way do not fit the traditional picture of normal. Some of the historical research the author cites is horrifying, such as the sterilization techniques and lobotomies used on those with mental disabilities. Mooney discusses the rise of eugenics and how Hitler adopted these ideas for his own Final Solution. He expertly brings the conversation back to a more personal level when he shares how, with the help of a friend, he began to accept his differences and embrace his neurodiversity, wrote a book, and then gave lectures on the benefits of neurodiversity. He touches lightly on the current ideas about the benefits of neurodiversity in society; some readers will wish this section was longer. Throughout, the author encourages readers to reexamine the concept of normality and to embrace the idea that all humans have something to offer society.
A new, engaging, and informative perspective that redefines what “normal” should really mean.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19016-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
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