by Judith Freeman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016
A poignant, searching memoir of self-discovery.
A novelist’s account of her early life growing up Mormon in Utah and the family memories she kept hidden from herself.
Freeman (The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, 2007, etc.) was the sixth child and second girl in a family of eight children raised by a “stoic…resourceful, and very loving” mother and a moody, unpredictable, physically abusive father. The people around her in Ogden were mostly Mormon, but as the family “wild girl,” it was the “heathens” and rebels who interested her most. Her eldest brother, Bob, was the first to escape the family when he joined the Navy at age 17. Though he died less than two years later, he still managed to marry a Catholic woman and father a “damaged” child with her; Freeman's devoutly Mormon parents would eventually shun both. Meanwhile, the author struck up friendships with non-Mormon girls who smoked, drank, and flirted with boys. At age 17, she married John Thorn, the Mormon boyfriend and BYU graduate her beautiful, “ladylike” elder sister had rejected and whom she found attractive precisely because he had been with her sibling. She became pregnant almost immediately and gave birth to a son with a heart defect. Freeman followed her husband to a job as a counselor at a Minnesota liberal arts college, where she befriended a group of young intellectuals. When the opportunity for an affair with the pediatric cardiologist treating her son arose, Freeman accepted it, just as she accepted returning home to her parents in the wake of her eventual divorce. The author’s story is highly readable, but its true power derives from the realizations she had later in life when she asked John to help her answer two questions: why she had married so young and chosen him as her husband. John’s answers revealed that while she may have succeeded in suppressing memories—which John brought forward—of her father’s cruelty, Freeman could never entirely free herself of the Mormon faith she had always questioned.
A poignant, searching memoir of self-discovery.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-90861-2
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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