Bullitt-Jonas tells the story of her food addiction and rescue. A Harvard-trained Episcopal priest now living in Brookline, Mass., the author says her eating disorder raged secretly out of control until she finally could face her pain and find a way out of it. “Overeating is a language with its own grammar and vocabulary,” she notes. “It’s as much a mistake to assume that compulsive eaters love food or love to eat as it is to assume that sexually promiscuous persons love the partners that they seduce and discard.” For her, “a binge often began with an angry mind, but by the end of the binge, the anger would be comfortably cloaked and soothed.” She—d gain as much as eleven pounds in four days. But the quiet pace of her self-discovery here slowly gathers force as the author probes not only her own tale, but also her family’s. She addresses both the nature of desire and the power that comes of finally putting desire into words and accepting it. What were the hindrances? Bullitt-Jonas was born into a world where thoughts were expected to leap “from the brain to the belly,” meanwhile “avoiding the heart.” Her family’s demands for excellence, poise, and self-control, coupled with their Cambridge-style academic leanings, all exerted a baleful force on her. Hidden behind their demands, her parents—at length divorced’seemed unduly detached from her. That her Harvard professor of English father (—the master of words—) was a tormented alcoholic and her Radcliffe trustee mother (—the master of silence—) was severely depressed throughout the daughter’s childhood were facts she learned only later. Recovering her own identity is the memoir’s goal, and Bullitt-Jonas gradually also gains insight into her family and other relationships. She clears a space that she can live in. An encouraging testimonial to the rewards of following a wise suggestion: “Heal thyself.”
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40094-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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