A courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.
An X Games competitive skier and photographer recounts an extraordinary life spent overcoming immense physical limitations.
Connolly was born without legs in the summer of 1985, in Helena, Mont., after his mother endured a lengthy, difficult labor. His condition is known as Bilateral Amelia of the lower extremities and, without artificial limbs, the author would live his life at 3’1” tall. The family made the best of the tragic situation by using humor to mask hardship or disappointment, but it was Connolly’s father, a tough man with a feathered mullet, who snapped into action and became inspired by the innovative inventions featured on the TV series MacGyver. With varying degrees of success and usefulness, he outfitted everything from handrails to toilet seats in an effort to accommodate his son. The dark side of living with a disability seeps through as Connolly describes the eagle-eyed scrutiny of cruel children, the unmanageability of prosthetics in grade school (“a pair of glorified, flesh-colored stilts wasn’t the solution”) and, wheelchair-bound, his daring (if unsuccessful) courtship of one of his classmates. Determined attempts at wrestling proved fruitless yet paved the way for major victories racing on a mono-ski atop Montana’s Bridger Bowl under the watchful eye of his proud father. Not wanting to “hold anyone else up,” Connolly spent school breaks traveling solo throughout Europe strapped to a skateboard, reuniting with kindhearted folks like Serge, an Internet friend living in the Ukraine. As powerful as his memoir reads, it is Connolly’s photographs—featured at the beginning of each chapter and on his website—of people’s reactions to him that provide a striking visual punch. By the end of his European vacation, he’d taken more than 900 “empowering,” “therapeutic” images, which today total more than 30,000. Embarking on both a stint at the X Games and a photographic project called “The Rolling Exhibition”—it has since been featured at The Smithsonian—the fearless author continues to persevere and seeks to motivate others.
A courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-179153-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperStudio
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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