A touching, highly poignant portrait of how family dynamics can survive despite disability and seemingly insurmountable...
A sister struggles with her brother’s autism while growing up and seeking personal fulfillment.
Award-winning journalist Combs details her tomboyish childhood in the late 1950s, first in Kansas, when her brother was born, and then in Denver, when things began to shift and sour. The author was 5, her brother just an infant, when their mother began fretting over the way Roddy “rocked in his crib, banging his head against the bars, not seeming to mind the pain, not crying as she hurried to him.” A misdiagnosis of cerebral palsy was corrected to Asperger’s years later. Meanwhile, Combs witnessed the discord of her parents’ relationship after a rushed move to Hazard, Kentucky. As she grew up, her sheer exasperation at her brother’s quizzical behavior quickly turned to fierce protectiveness when the schoolyard bullies tormented him. Eventually, the author’s vibrant life began buckling beneath the weight of Roddy’s rages and the family’s growing impatience with an impairment they could not fully understood, manage, or treat at the time. “My brother’s response to any request was like a tangled almanac,” she writes, “a set of warnings that might or might not advance to a full-blown tornado.” All of this took a toll on Combs, who realized that she had spent a good portion of her youth sheltering her brother yet not fully cultivating her own dreams and desires since she “always tried to be the son that Roddy couldn’t be.” Through the years, the author would “escape the undertow of my brother’s tantrums” to pursue collegiate gymnastics and, later, marriage and children. Once reunited a decade later, the intricate, complex familial bond with Roddy showed signs of deterioration but remained unbroken, despite distance and maturity. Though swift-moving, the narrative is richly textured, layered with colorfully outlined imagery and descriptive prose, perfectly suiting this bittersweet chronicle of love, pain, and fierce devotion.
A touching, highly poignant portrait of how family dynamics can survive despite disability and seemingly insurmountable challenges.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1531-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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