Mutch's story is absorbing and creatively rendered, but the central mystery remains.
An unhappy yet hopeful story of "a sleepless parent [and] a wordless child."
In a poetic, entrancing voice, debut author Mutch chronicles how she and her autistic son, who also has Down syndrome, endured a two-year stretch of not sleeping through the night. She shepherded nonverbal 9-year-old Gabriel through his episodes of shrieks and noises—during which the tenderhearted, jazz-loving boy she adored vanished—and struggled to make sense of his confounding behavior. She desperately wanted to understand what Gabriel was "communicating" through these outbursts, but she was unable to break the code. Luckily for him, her husband slept through most of these chaotic episodes (their younger child is also a minor character in this tale), casting the author as the heroine looking to pierce Gabriel's impenetrable outer self. Readers experience Mutch's dazed state of mind as she relates her dreamlike memories, which give her memoir a novelistic tone; she tells of "hospital corridors blank as laundry chutes" and laments that "there is no sorcery for the problem" she faced. During this period, the author repeatedly read Adm. Robert Byrd's memoir detailing his six months alone during the Antarctic winter in 1934. She explores her son's silences and attendant nightly shrieks as Byrd did the perpetual night of the frozen, uncharted polar territory, and she regards his experiences as "correlative with the psychic regions where I've been stumbling.” This kinship eventually hijacks her own story, possibly since his adventures offered an exciting respite to her son's nightly shouting, which, no matter her steadfastness, made her delirious. Further, the foreshadowing and imagined significance of events before this period try the patience of readers eager for the story to move toward its conclusion.
Mutch's story is absorbing and creatively rendered, but the central mystery remains.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0274-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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