Warm and wise.
A collection of soul-searching reflections by a woman coming to terms with the three major challenges of midlife: change, loss and death.
After sending her troubled youngest son to boarding school to pull himself together again, writer and editor Kenison suddenly realized that her life "as a mother of children at home" was over. All she had so painstakingly built in the first half of her life was starting to come apart. But rather than succumb to despair, the author decided to turn her focus inward and use the opportunity to begin what mythologist Joseph Campbell called "the hero's journey.” Campbell's archetype was based in male experience, but it was still a useful starting point for Kenison, who speaks directly about the transformational midlife experiences that are unique to women—e.g., menopause. As she dealt with the physical "depletion[s]" of aging, the unaccustomed silence of an empty home and the sometimes-uncomfortable shifts in her marriage, she also had to cope with a close friend's terminal-cancer diagnosis. It was yet another rite of initiation along a new, unmarked path. While mourning for her friend, Kenison began to understand the power of gratitude and take even more profound pleasure in everything she had ever taken for granted, from "a night of peaceful sleep" to "[her] husband's embrace." She also realized that in loss was a freedom that would allow her to explore meaningful ways to experience life. No longer bound to the hearth, she immersed herself in the practice of yoga at a training center away from her home, and she learned the healing art of reiki, which allowed her to connect more deeply with others around her.
Warm and wise.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0723-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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