A turbulent childhood is accurately rendered in this gritty, raw memoir of Carlisle’s family and her search for the truth...
Carlisle (Writing/Trinity Univ.) chronicles her quest to know the mother who died when the author was 3 weeks old.
The author had always been told that her mother died in a car accident, but after meeting with a detective when she was 8, she was left pondering what had actually happened to her. Carlisle had memories of living with her grandmother, Spence, and her good friend, Dee, and when Spence died, of moving in with her grandfather and his second wife. Both groups gave her snippets of information about her mother which often contradicted each other and never satisfied the desire to understand her past. Carlisle writes about how her childhood was different than most of her schoolmates’: her grandfather owned an adult video store, they lived on a boat with six cats, she had no idea who her father was, and she could find very few pictures of her mother. Her story intertwines the musings of a child who doesn't understand the complex world of adults, especially the dysfunctional adults who made up her world—the johns, the alcoholics, the men who frequented her grandfather's video store—with the adult woman on a mission to find out as much as she could about her mother. From the numerous, minute details the author includes, she was obviously loved, but she still lays bare the ugly moments, particularly of her grandfather, in her portrayals of her family. The nature of her mother's death and the compassion Carlisle feels toward her family justify the slow reveal of her family's sordid past. The book also includes a reading group guide and a conversation with the author.
A turbulent childhood is accurately rendered in this gritty, raw memoir of Carlisle’s family and her search for the truth about her mother's death.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4520-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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