A memoir that crafts a neatly resolved narrative though it doesn’t always dive as deeply as it could have.
Reinhart’s debut memoir recounts her childhood and early adulthood as she worked toward stability and self-realization.
The author was born in 1969 near Oakland, California, and she and her family moved into the city itself soon afterward. Reinhart had to quickly adjust to life in the “Holy Hill” neighborhood; at school, Reinhart says, she learned “from one of the toughest girls” there to stick up for herself and to never be a “mark.” As one of the few white kids at her school, she struggled to find a way into the social scene, she says. Although her parents weren’t religious, she joined a local community of arch-conservative Apostolic Pentecostals. Through the church, she befriended 19-year-old Lindsay, who gave her horseback-riding lessons; she also taught Reinhart how to cook and clean in a more laid-back way than her own fastidious mother did. The author eventually took exception to her church’s treatment of women, and by junior high, she’d delved further into her school’s party scene and began going on dates—sometimes with older men in their 20s. Reinhart also says that she became increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol. After finishing high school, she studied to become a hairstylist and was successful in her career before an unexpected pregnancy at the age of 20 changed her life forever. Overall, Reinhart writes in a conversational tone, as if she’s telling a juicy story to a good friend. This voice makes her memoir an easy read even when the subject matter takes darker turns. Her portrayal of her relationship with her mother is deeply detailed although her connections with her sister and father are less defined. Reinhart ends her story tidily with a description of how she came to “manifest” her goals and bring them to fruition. However, she tells more about this transformation than she shows, which makes the overall arc somewhat unsatisfying; for instance, when she describes her relationship with her future husband, Hunter, she stuffs their scenes of conflict with explanation rather than letting readers draw their own conclusions.
A memoir that crafts a neatly resolved narrative though it doesn’t always dive as deeply as it could have.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-383-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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