McClelland’s candor and empathy are admirable, but this would have benefited from more editorial shaping.
Sprawling memoir of an adventurous journalist’s experiences with PTSD.
National Magazine Award–nominated writer McClelland (For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War, 2010) considered herself accustomed to tough environments. However, on the ground in Haiti to cover the chaotic reconstruction following the 2010 earthquake, she witnessed acts of sexual violence (left largely unspecified) that instilled in her a severe case of PTSD, manifesting in jolting physical symptoms: “[f]lashbacks of the screaming incident I witnessed in Haiti burst into my head and I lay there, soft and failed, choking on instant hard sobs.” Yet on the same trip, she had begun an improbable romance with Nico, a youthful French soldier. When she was back in the United States, they kept in touch via Skype, but McClelland’s PTSD symptoms and attendant depression became more debilitating. When she first published writing about her experience, she was condemned for solipsism, yet she also heard from many fellow sufferers, ranging from women who’d encountered domestic violence to a growing community of PTSD-afflicted combat veterans and their families: “They were the collateral damage that didn’t end with veterans, that everyone pretended didn’t exist….” As McClelland tried to hang on to her relationship with Nico, she realized that her experiences were representative of a large, undiagnosed demographic of suffering. She discovered that an extensive, therapy-based treatment regimen (involving the examination of every trauma in her past, including the explosive dissolution of her parents’ relationship) allowed her to move forward gradually, into accepting Nico’s impulsive marriage proposal. The author takes a maximalist approach, focusing exhaustively on her own experiences and grim sensations (as well as those of the people she encounters), so the narrative feels progressively less focused while remaining compassionate and perceptive regarding this elusive malady.
McClelland’s candor and empathy are admirable, but this would have benefited from more editorial shaping.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250052896
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
