A moving, honest, and laughter-filled account of eight women who gather one weekend every year and enjoy themselves to the...
Loyalty and friendship among eight women.
In 1993, Link (Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, 2013) was “a thirty-one-year old wife and mother of two, a bar waitress with a college degree” who was about to engage in “the most radical act [she’d] committed in years.” She was headed to Drummond Island in Lake Huron with three other women, her fellow co-workers, for a three-day wild weekend. They planned to stay up late and eat and drink whatever they wanted. For three days, they had no responsibilities except to each other and to “just keep going.” From that auspicious weekend, the Drummond Girls were born, and they vowed to return each year together unless they were pregnant or dead. When four more friends were added to the mix, the final group was set, and this troupe of women faithfully returned to Drummond Island each year. With humor, honesty, and a deep love for each individual, Link describes the slow but steady buildup of friendship and loyalty among the members as they ate, drank, played pool at the local bars, wandered in the dead of night through the thick woods to find bears, and generally bonded in ways that many women may never experience in their lifetimes. She discusses the troubles with spouses who didn’t understand the need for these trips and the ups and downs of each woman’s life off the island, which only underlines how free these women feel each time they gather. Link ably portrays her initial sense of isolation and need for friendship, providing descriptions of the wilderness she has found on the island and her increasing allegiance to these women as they all gradually grow older and experience life events that change them forever.
A moving, honest, and laughter-filled account of eight women who gather one weekend every year and enjoy themselves to the fullest.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5474-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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