A somber and depressing account of a woman's incomplete escape from the most dysfunctional of families. New meaning accrues to the phrase ``self-help book'' as one comes to realize that here is a memoir written for the sake of the author's own therapy, a way of healing by finally letting go of the terrible secrets she has accumulated over her first 40 years (she was born in 1949). These secrets include a tyrannical upbringing on an isolated English farm, a horrifying encounter with a Nazi doctor, physical abuse at the hands of her first husband, anorexia, and a sad, unspoken heritage, the details of which her parents took to their graves, but not without a trail of bread crumbs that might lead the author to salvation and a much-needed sense of identity. The father, Russian-born architect Berthold Lubetkin, is clearly earmarked as the source of all the suffering and shows every warning sign of pure evil: he's a staunch communist, he verbally assaults his wife and children, he even has an evil eye, ``a pupil- less and inscrutable pigeon gray, like a monocle.'' Kehoe, a freelance journalist, seems more interested here in speaking to herself than to the reader, and so what is vivid in her mind is often vague on the page. She tells of her father's wicked sense of humor but offers little proof. Her brother and sister fade in and out of the book, never really achieving three-dimensional characterization, but rather serving at first as foils in the jealousies of a child desperate for attention and later as mileposts of the distance traveled from devastating childhood to a fragile maturity. Author, heal thyself.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8052-4122-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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