The teenage years are often marked by difficult, confusing physical and mental changes, which often cause minor, and...
A harrowing memoir of mental and medical abuse.
The teenage years are often marked by difficult, confusing physical and mental changes, which often cause minor, and temporary, family strife. When author Welton was a teenager, however, her emotionally abusive parents interpreted her normal, adolescent moodiness, sleepiness and occasional bouts of sadness as mental illness. On a trip home from college, the author was whisked away to a mental institution, where she was treated with powerful psychotropic drugs and electroshock therapy. While there, she learned to adhere to her doctors’ expectations for “improvement,” even if it came at the expense of her own individual voice and authority. Under the dubious care of a psychiatrist, she underwent 66 electroshock treatments in less than 10 years—treatments that damaged her memory and caused severe post-traumatic stress disorder. As she matured, however, she embarked on a journey to heal herself physically and emotionally, finding solace in music, religion, her academic work, the love of her friends and the sympathetic responses of caring therapists. When she was diagnosed with cancer, however, flashbacks of her previous violent, inhumane treatment made fighting the disease even more traumatic. Welton’s memoir doesn’t shy away from ugly truths about the ways that mental illness was understood and treated in the not-so-distant past, nor does it sugarcoat the experience of having two deeply miserable alcoholic and abusive parents. The author’s research also serves her well, as her myriad references to science and art give readers a well-rounded approach to a complex topic. The writing is fluid and often lovely despite the horror of the subject matter (“As Larkin hurried to turn on the oxygen, he brushed against the curtain, pulling it back slightly, and I saw a man on the gurney with a plastic mask on his face”). Overall, Welton’s search for peace and forgiveness will likely inspire others looking for ways to heal from childhood trauma.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502521149
Page Count: 156
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
