Not refined, wise or gritty enough to touch all readers, but likely to be a hit with teenagers and 20-somethings.
A young memoirist recounts her descent into and triumph over addiction.
Smith arrived in New York City in 1997, fresh from high school in Danville, Pa. A natural on the stage, she came to the Big Apple to pursue her dreams of acting. But before she could be discovered, she discovered Ecstasy. The first pill she popped was a Mitsubishi, purchased from a dealer who looked like a J. Crew model and swallowed in the bathroom of McSwiggans Pub on Second Avenue. All of the sudden, the beer bottles glistened “like lights on a Christmas tree,” Smith’s skin turned to silk, and simply placing her palm on the top of the bar felt profound. She was hooked. Meanwhile, life in Manhattan rolled on. There were sublets to find, singing lessons to take, and kids to baby-sit. Smith fell head over heels for Mason, a Manhattanite home on winter break from a Vermont college. Then came the crash. She was plagued by panic attacks and nightmares about her father killing her family. Her period stopped; she occasionally flew into rages. Eventually, Smith got herself into rehab. She broke her addiction and quickly became an MTV-touted anti-drug spokeswoman. At the close here, she tells us that she’s been clean for four years, and now gets “high on life.” As that last cliché indicates, Smith’s writing is uneven. Her descriptions of how good the highs feel are riveting. One wishes, however, that her editor had axed the poems. (“One pill has dissolved / Chills surge through my core / Before it wears off / I swallow one more.”) And her rapturous prose about her love for Mason tends toward the sophomoric: “I knew he was my soul mate . . . .When I looked into his eyes, I felt like I had known him my whole life.”
Not refined, wise or gritty enough to touch all readers, but likely to be a hit with teenagers and 20-somethings.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-9043-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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