Likely to score well with readers hungry for 1980s-style self-help ruminations. But those who want something with more...
An affair holds the key to renewal, in an unsatisfying follow-up to Hannah’s Gift (2002).
Previously, the best-selling Housden told the harrowing story of her three-year-old daughter’s death. Now, in a sequel of sorts, she chronicles the next season in her own journey as mother, wife and woman. After Hannah died, Housden and her husband, Claude, had another child, but their marriage was on the rocks. Claude stopped wearing his wedding ring, and Housden suspected he’d had a fling while on a ten-day business trip. Craving time alone, she takes a retreat at a hermitage. “I could not shake the feeling,” she recalls, “that I was here to meet someone.” That someone is Roger, a dashing English author, with whom Housden has an affair. The affair “gently” opens her heart, “petal by petal,” and she returns home to tell Claude she wants a divorce. The two determine that he should take primary custody—hence the subtitle’s “different kind of mother.” Eventually, Housden marries Roger, and together they settle in as the non-custodial caregivers of her three children. Housden fears she’ll be judged—what kind of mother willingly gives up custody of her kids? But the memoir’s problems don’t stem from Housden’s presentation of her parenting. The few sections devoted to the mundanities of parenting are engaging. Indeed, one might wish Housden had spent more time detailing the nitty-gritty of non-custodial parenting. The trouble comes instead from Housden’s description of her affair and divorce. Her blasé acceptance of adultery, together with the suggestion that her affair was the transformative event that allowed her to discover her true self, rankles. The tone is self-congratulatory, and Housden’s efforts at profundity fall flat: “Safe. . . was someone else’s idea of a life, not mine.”
Likely to score well with readers hungry for 1980s-style self-help ruminations. But those who want something with more bite—and self-criticism—will have to look elsewhere.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5416-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
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