by Kim Rich ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018
An uneven memoir full of meticulous details and some funny moments.
The story of the author’s search for a meaningful life after tragedy.
Rich (Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld, 1993) begins her narrative shortly after the death of her mother and murder of her father when she was in her teens. In a straightforward, journalistic style, she chronicles how, as an orphan in Alaska, she drifted from one friend’s home to another, attended high school, made friends, and explored nature, all while searching for a normal lifestyle. She then moves on to discuss her move to New York City, her college days, her first marriage, and her ventures into journalism. Eventually, Rich shares the details of writing her first memoir, Johnny’s Girl, which started out as a series of newspaper articles and was later made into a Hallmark TV movie. Once she moves past those early years, the author’s writing becomes somewhat less rote, and she focuses on minute details of her childhood and touching, sometimes-humorous tales of her grandfather, who suffered from dementia and struggled against a woman’s plot to marry him and take his money. Rich’s tone grows more serious as she discusses her bout with breast cancer and the frightening decisions she had to make during that period. She quickly follows with her troubles conceiving a child with her second husband and the efforts they made to create a family via fertility treatments and adoption. The second half of the book is far more vibrant and emotionally gripping than the first, allowing readers a closer look at the author as she is today rather than the awkward adolescent she used to be. For those who read Johnny’s Girl and want to know what happened next, this book has the answers.
An uneven memoir full of meticulous details and some funny moments.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943328-50-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Alaska Northwest Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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by Kim Rich
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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