Strong stuff, but an authentic picture of the emotional fog and urgent needs that sometimes leads teenagers to self-destruct.
A singular story of a girl who, when she discovered boys in the spring of her 14th year, set her sights on having sex with as many as possible.
Dobie was the well-brought-up oldest of six children in a loving Catholic family in a small Connecticut town. But from the day she parked herself on her front lawn waiting for someone to take her virginity to the day six months later when she whispered “okay” to sex with four boys in the back seat of a car, the author was on a search for “bad” boys, “confident, aggressive, dirty-minded.” She found them in the nearby Teen Center, hanging around the pool tables, with their girl friends clustered on couches against the wall. Dobie didn’t want to be one of the girlfriends, she wanted to be like the boys, wild and vital. Her entrée was sex, of course, as she made herself available to one after another, hopping in the car—the only girl—as the boys went off for a beer run. At first, Dobie thrived on the recognition she received for being the town’s designated bad girl, promiscuous and proud of it, even when it manifested itself as gossip and mockery from schoolmates. Though some kindhearted acquaintances took her aside to warn her that her “rep” wasn’t that of the powerful femme fatale she imagined herself to be, and that she was putting herself in real danger, she ignored the warning and all the other portents of disaster that she in retrospect sees all too clearly. One night as she enjoys her status as the only girl in the car, her current flame tells her that he’s promised she’ll have sex with the three other boys riding with them. The demand makes her miserable, but she has no practice saying “no,” and so she suffers through the painful, humiliating experience—with no idea how long the pain and humiliation will last. Her ordeal remained secret from her family and teachers, but her peers—including the boys in the car—taunted, reviled, and threatened her in the most base and cruel manner for the next two or three years. Ostracized, in a black hole of shame, she turned to writing. Now 20 years older and an established writer, Dobie offers an unsettling and unsparing recounting of an incident that she could not examine until now. It is relieved by stories of loving relationships between her and her siblings and by parents who supported her even when they knew something terrible was being hidden.
Strong stuff, but an authentic picture of the emotional fog and urgent needs that sometimes leads teenagers to self-destruct.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-31880-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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