Well-written and relentlessly self-aware.
An introspective, decidedly un-cheery work that seeks to set the author’s record straight.
After Armstrong wrote an account of her seven years as a Catholic nun (Through the Narrow Gate, 1981), she followed it up with a cheery but admittedly untruthful memoir depicting her new life outside the convent (Beginning the World, 1983). Now, to describe the turnings her life took as she struggled to find her way in a secular world, Armstrong (Islam, 2000, etc.) adopts the image of a spiral staircase as a symbol of spiritual progress in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday. First as a student at Oxford, where she earned a B.A. and M. Litt., but failed to obtain a doctorate, and then as a teacher in a private girls’ school in London, a position from which she was dismissed after a few years, she was what can best be described as an emotional wreck. Fainting spells while still in the convent progressed to episodes of amnesia and panic attacks, which led to years of useless sessions with psychiatrists, anorexia, even a suicide attempt and hospitalizations. Finally, in 1976, a physician recognized her epileptic seizures for what they were and put her on appropriate medication. At a loss as to how to make a living after losing her teaching job, Armstrong was in despair when publicity surrounding her first book brought her TV work. An early disastrous appearance convinced her that she could not make a career out of being an ex-nun, and when a chance to write a low-budget documentary on the early Christians came along, she grabbed it. By 1983 she was in Israel researching her subject. Exposure to Judaism and Islam while in the Middle East set her on a new course: writing about the historical development of the three great Abrahamic faiths, and in doing so examining her own ideas about religion, spirituality, and God. From her teenage search for God in a convent and her subsequent attempts to debunk religion, Armstrong struggled to clarify her own beliefs. What matters, she concludes at last, is not dogma, or right belief, but right action—in a nutshell, the Golden Rule.
Well-written and relentlessly self-aware.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41318-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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