An expressive account of one family’s struggles to help a child with serious addiction issues.
A woman struggles to cope with her son’s addictions.
With three decades of teaching and multiple books on addiction under her belt, Ketcham (co-author: The Pain Antidote: The Proven Program to Help You Stop Suffering from Chronic Pain, Avoid Addiction to Painkillers—and Reclaim Your Life, 2015, etc.) was considered an expert on the subject, but she was totally unprepared when she discovered her son, Ben, was addicted to drugs and alcohol. In this honest account, the author shares her doubts, fears, anger, and angst as she and her husband strove to help Ben in any way that they could. She readily admits she missed the beginning telltale signs of his drug use, which started in high school. “Addiction isn’t a choice,” she writes, “it’s not a moral failure, a maladaptive lifestyle habit, or a developmental learning disorder—it’s a brain disease that is both chronic and progressive.” Yet these knowledgeable words often brought little comfort as she attempted to help Ben, who fought against most of the help he was given, including expensive rehab treatments. Ketcham ponders whether she was too heavy-handed in her counseling and suggestions when Ben’s abuse became obvious, and she even questions her effectiveness as a mother. She chronicles her discussions of her work with kids in juvenile detention, and she uses excerpts from some of her earlier books to help clarify some of the ideas she explores. She also examines concepts of spirituality, forgiveness, and change as she relates the many years it took before Ben decided to get clean. The author’s hard-won wisdom and often unanswerable questions help readers see the far-reaching effects of alcohol and drug abuse, and the inclusion of comments from Ben demonstrates the pain and anguish felt on all sides of the situation.
An expressive account of one family’s struggles to help a child with serious addiction issues.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62203-977-7
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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