Despite its sheepish title, this is a commanding story not of a little girl lost, but of a woman-survivor who found herself and God in the painful aftermath of rape. Joseph enjoyed a storybook midwestern childhood until she was eight, when her loving father was killed in an engineering accident. His death threw the family in a quandary: Joseph’s mother sank into a decade-long battle with manic-depression, and Joseph and her three older brothers were left to fend for themselves. But by age 18, the young woman and her family had turned their lives around. Joseph became a model student and committed evangelical Christian, and was elected homecoming queen. Yet her world was about to be torn asunder once again. Shortly after her high school graduation and before her marriage, Joseph was raped at gunpoint in a mall parking lot by a serial rapist who had disabled her car. Joseph again employed her faith to emerge triumphant from this dark, painful time, encouraging the rapist’s other victims to file charges against him. After his conviction, she continued to struggle with trauma from the rape. Her memoir speaks honestly of her fears of sexual relations with her new husband and the deep anger she had welling inside her, ready to be unleashed on the people she loved the most. Joseph found healing by speaking out about her experience, first to local church groups and eventually to a national audience on the 700 Club. She also testified in another court case (her attacker attempted to rape another woman soon after his speedy parole), even finding the courage to present the rapist with a monogrammed, leather-bound Bible, which she prayed he would read. Moving and very frank, Joseph’s story will offer courage to many women, Christian and otherwise, who have been victims of rape. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49239-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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