A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous (if not excessive) detail.
In this debut memoir, the author steps away from her religion, leading to both severe social consequences and personal fulfillment.
Curtis grew up in Portland in a family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. She was as faithful as could be, incessantly attending meetings and preaching to others, all while successfully pursuing a career at an American bank. She and her equally dedicated husband, Ross, lived happy, faithful lives together until a moment that changed everything. While proselyting, Curtis knocked on the door of a co-worker, and suddenly her message about the impending destruction of nonbelievers just didn’t ring true anymore. The author’s doubts festered and eventually led her to divorce both her husband and her faith. According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, only death or sexual relations with another person can officially end a marriage. Curtis had sex after her divorce, but she kept this to herself. After moving to Chicago, climbing the corporate career even further, and finding fulfillment in other belief systems, she took the final step of confessing her sexual encounters and apostasy to her family and church leaders. The official shunning commenced and has continued to this day, only temporarily suspended for funerals. Curtis has organized her thoughts well and expresses them clearly and entertainingly. No detail of her spiritual, social, and professional journey, however, is too small to share, which stalls momentum. Still, the author’s radical transformation—from dogmatism to relativism and from timidity to self-assurance—unfolds gradually and genuinely. Beyond providing an eye-opening look at her former religious community, this memoir subtly encourages readers to challenge childhood views in search of chosen beliefs.
A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous (if not excessive) detail.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-328-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 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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