One of those interior travelogues that, like home movies, are not terribly compelling for outsiders.
A middle-aged woman who moved to Vermont to begin a new life pens an earnest, well-crafted celebration of the discovery of love, self-knowledge, and meaning.
Maloy’s well-intentioned account of a life transformed by love and faith is often an enervating exercise in conventional self-regard; the disappointments of her life are not so different from those of millions of men and women. This is not a dramatic tale of raging passions and horrible hurts but rather a familiar record, conventionally perceived, of the steady drip of the usual blows that leach hope from hearts. Maloy did not get on well with her religion-obsessed mother, and her father remained a distant figure. She married young, divorced, then married another unsuitable man and grew to hate her writing job. By the time she reached her 50s in Pittsburgh, her only joy was her young son Adam, her only hope the God her Quaker said her resided in each individual as a transforming light. But her life changed miraculously one Sunday in 1996 when, after attending a Quaker Meeting, she saw a house and realized she wanted to live there with Adam. Now her life suddenly had purpose. Confident of God’s presence in her life and the fitness of her past as prelude to this moment, she divorced her husband, bought the house, and then met Alan on the Internet. An e-mail courtship led to marriage and life in Vermont, a place Maloy had always considered her true home. Now at peace and braced by faith, she looks back from the perspective of the year beginning in the summer of 1998—as she, Alan, and Adam move into the house—on her past, her adjustments to her marriage, her Quaker faith and pacifist beliefs, and the unfolding seasons.
One of those interior travelogues that, like home movies, are not terribly compelling for outsiders.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-145-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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