A contemplative, soul-searching account of the death of the author’s beloved father and how she used long-distance running...
A female runner learns more about herself with each race she runs.
Arnold, a Santa Fe–based contributing editor at Outside magazine, shares the specifics of her childhood and the relationship she had with her father, a photographer for National Geographic, a profession she respected even as a child (“just the thought of this gave me a little shiver of pride”). When he fell terminally ill, the author embarked on a search to find out who he really was and why he left her mother when she was a young girl. In meticulous detail, Arnold recounts the many times she and her sister visited their father over the years and the ways in which he pushed her to do more than she thought she could. The first example was a six-mile race she ran at the age of 7, an event that set the author up to be a dedicated runner for life. She used running to deal with her father’s death, to overcome her doubts as a mother, and to find herself in each phase of her life. Inviting descriptions of the surrounding countryside, the natural highs of extreme exercise, and the pursuit of a peaceful existence balance the monotony of learning how Arnold prepares for each race, each one seemingly longer than the last. She describes setting personal goals prior to each race and how she pushed through the pain and self-doubt to finish. Interwoven with stories of her father and running are the author’s reflections on being a mother of two girls and life with her husband, who also runs but who gives Arnold the space and freedom to pursue her own goals. Although overlong, Arnold’s memoir will appeal to runners of all types, whether they participate in short-distance races or ultralong endurance tests.
A contemplative, soul-searching account of the death of the author’s beloved father and how she used long-distance running as a way to heal from the grief.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-425-28465-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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