Readers expecting a fairy-tale ending when they finish the book can’t have been reading very closely, but Preston comes to a...
An inspiring memoir about the author’s struggle to come to terms with her stuttering.
More than 60 million people worldwide deal with the condition of stuttering, and many of them still struggle with the root causes of that stuttering, whether it be physical pain in childhood, repression of emotions, or other starting points mired in PTSD. Preston began stuttering around the age of 7, and the book starts there, smartly capturing the mix of abject terror and curious observation that childhood stuttering can create. The stakes, viewed from adulthood, may not seem as high, but to a child, it’s a bitter victory to evade stuttering by asking for the ice cream treat in a cup instead of the desired (but difficult to say) “waffle cone.” In different points of her life, the author found connections in interesting ways; for example, Preston’s parents enrolled her in speech therapy in a program named after Monty Python member Michael Palin. Watching the stutterer in Palin’s film A Fish Called Wanda, the author felt mortification as her friends stole glances at her. Years later, Preston met Palin, who dealt with stuttering as a child, and they discussed his rationale for the part. She chronicles her many interviews with fellow stutterers—people bullied, people strengthened and people driven from those they care about. She also traces her own coming-of-age through the maze of stuttering—e.g., learning how to flirt with boys in ways that left her in control of the conversation.
Readers expecting a fairy-tale ending when they finish the book can’t have been reading very closely, but Preston comes to a truce with stuttering, and her battles with it make for engaging reading.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7658-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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