An emotional account that will particularly interest prisoners and their families.
Rutkin’s debut memoir recalls her yearlong separation from her husband, a cop, as he was imprisoned for stealing money from drug dealers.
In 1976, the author’s new husband, Matthew Smith, was indicted on charges of grand larceny—just four days into their honeymoon. After a drug bust the previous year, five officers had stolen $30,000 in cash from the suspects; Smith’s share of the take had been $3,000. (“They weren’t doing anything different than anyone else on the job,” he later told Rutkin for this book.) Smith refused to turn state’s evidence against other cops, and beginning in September 1977, he served 366 days in prison. Rutkin was understandably angry, as well as sad, lonely, and worried; she also had financial troubles, including bankruptcy, to handle. But she was determined to bolster her husband through his depression, isolation, shame, and fear. The couple wrote to each other nearly every day in letters filled “with our love and longing, with day-to-day, hour-to-hour chronologies of our comings and goings.” Over time, Rutkin learned to address her own emotional needs and detach when cheering up her husband became exhausting. At length, the couple resumed a normal life after his release in 1978, and they’re still married today. Although readers may not have much sympathy for Smith at first, his letters and Rutkin’s writing provide a balanced view of events. Extracts from Smith’s well-written letters give readers vivid glimpses of prison life—jobs, friendships, his attempts to better his placement—as well as of his own feelings; they portray a sensitive, intelligent man with a deep need for belonging. Rutkin’s contemporary comments strengthen the memoir by adding nuance to the story told in the letters: “I choke on the dreams that flit through them…I get dizzy with these pages and pages of pie-in-the-sky affirmations.” But although the book is insightful, some readers may not find the separation to be as significant as Rutkin does, due to its relative brevity.
An emotional account that will particularly interest prisoners and their families.Pub Date: May 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4685-3921-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2017
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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