A surprisingly evocative account that, perhaps as a result of its author’s current career as a therapist, at times veers...
Sure to be marketed as an exposé on raising Courtney Love, the walking car crash of our time, Carroll’s is an unassuming and reflective coming-of-age memoir.
Carroll’s adoptive parents provided her creature comforts but no real tenderness. Mom Louella was one of those cold and sometimes cruel wealthy women of countless melodramas; though always perfectly appointed, her outbursts revealed a severely damaged core (Carroll’s biological mother, she would later learn, is the memoirist Paula Fox). Unlike Louella, father “Jack” was warm and (overly) affectionate—his constant ogling of his daughter crossed over into fondling more than once. Carroll’s childhood and teen years mimic those of countless rebellious, too-smart-for-their-own-good youths; she gets kicked out of several Catholic schools, dates a James Dean greaser and just after high-school graduation, falls in with a crowd of hedonistic, pseudo-intellectual San Francisco bohemians. One of these, eccentric wannabe professor Frank, fathers Carroll’s first child, known to the subsequent generation as rock star Courtney Love, just after Carroll’s 18th birthday. A string of marriages and children follow—three and five, respectively. As Carroll finally confronts her psychological demons and navigates a path toward happiness, she watches her eldest (only sometimes estranged) daughter, the violent and untameable Courtney, live out her dramatic downward spiral in the public eye. Carroll has a strength for capturing her various environments—from the Haight-Ashbury beatnik scene of the late ’60s, to her New Age, post-hippie life in New Zealand in the ’70s. But the plodding chronology of “then-this-happened” has a dulling effect.
A surprisingly evocative account that, perhaps as a result of its author’s current career as a therapist, at times veers dangerously close to self-help territory.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51247-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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