A flawed but still courageous and inspiring book from a genuine hero.
A former first-grade teacher’s heartfelt account of how she survived both the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and the events that followed it.
Roig-DeBellis always knew she wanted to work with children and “help them become the best people they could possibly be.” So when she was hired to teach first grade at Sandy Hook starting in the fall of 2007, she was thrilled. Each day was a joy: “we just didn’t have bad days at Sandy Hook. It was always sunny inside.” All that changed on Dec. 14, 2012, when a gunman—whose name she has since refused to speak—came onto campus and killed 20 children and 6 adults. The minute Roig-DeBellis heard gunshots, she hid 15 students and herself in a tiny class bathroom and prayed. After her rescue she discovered that the gunman had miraculously skipped her classroom—which was the first in the hallway where the gunman began his spree—and gone into the classrooms next to hers, “shooting everyone he saw.” Despite support from family and friends, the author’s nightmare did not end with her rescue. School administrators repeatedly ignored her efforts to create enhanced classroom safety measures for her traumatized students, and they eventually asked her to take a leave from teaching. Undeterred, Roig-DeBellis took the time off to turn a classroom project that used donated items and funds received after the massacre to help needy students at other schools into a nonprofit organization called Classes 4 Classes. Though it may strike some readers as Pollyannaish, the author’s sunny optimism about the teaching profession is sincere. Her account of the shooting, her struggle to keep despair at bay in both herself and her students, and her ultimate triumph as a survivor seeking to make a difference help balance the book and redeem it from excessive sentimentality.
A flawed but still courageous and inspiring book from a genuine hero.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17445-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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.
