A raw, somber emotional journey that concludes with hope and a measure of forgiveness.
Drawing on letters and newspaper articles, former writing instructor and political advocate Moran re-creates her personal history and the events leading up to Sept. 11, 1976, when Croatian freedom fighters launched a terrorist attack in New York City that killed her husband.
In this moving memoir, the author recalls the panic gripping her as Walter Cronkite delivered the report of a Chicago-bound flight that had been hijacked by Zvonko and Julie Busic, a Croatian man and his American wife. The lockers at Grand Central subway station had also been bombed, and Moran’s husband, Brian, a member of the NYPD bomb squad, perished when the explosive suddenly detonated. The author provides details of life growing up in the late-1960s South Bronx with seven brothers and sisters, several of whom were physically abusive or drug-addled, an abusive father, and an elusive mother who raised her children with resentment. The evolution of her seven-year romance with Brian also resonates throughout. Moran recalls meeting the recently discharged Air Force serviceman when she was 21, and she was instantly intrigued and attracted after his bold declaration that they would be married someday. The author delicately yet unreservedly explores a widow’s experience: the necessary yet near-impossible task of reconciling a senseless death to a terrorist organization, the unanswered questions and insecurity, and the crushing reality of suddenly becoming a single parent to small children. The estrangement between Moran and her drug-addicted sister Gracie added further sorrow to her life, though she achieved a measure of closure from discovering exactly how her husband died and meticulously researching the hijackers, who were members of the Fighters for Free Croatia terrorist movement. In the closing chapters, the author delivers some engaging revelations. She remarried and, unable to reconcile the details of Brian’s death, filed a lawsuit against New York for gross negligence, which was eventually dismissed. She also began correspondence with one of the hijackers, who sought atonement and a chance to “unload emotionally.”
A raw, somber emotional journey that concludes with hope and a measure of forgiveness.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944995-32-4
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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