From the popular octogenarian columnist and inspirational author (The Messiah, 1987, etc.): a moving and refreshingly candid account of her second marriage. Announcing that ``this book is about the most exciting adventure of [my] life,'' Holmes tells how, in her early 70s, she met and married ``an incredible man'' with whom, for the first time in her life, she could share ``almost everything [I] thought and felt.'' Married for nearly 50 years to a devoted husband with whom, however, she had little in common, Holmes found widowhood a lonely business. But on New Year's Eve 1980, she received a surprise call from a stranger, one George Schmieler, who was to change her life. George, devastated by the recent death of his own spouse, Caroyln, had called because he'd been moved by reading a copy of Holmes's 1969 bestseller, I've Got to Talk to Somebody, God, which he'd found among his wife's possessions. Meetings and a proposal of marriage followed, and Holmes realized that, in George, she'd found the great love of her life. The couple married in 1981 and went on to enjoy a decade of togetherness until George's death—a decade that ``has been the happiest, most romantic, inspiring, and beautiful of all.'' But what gives Holmes's story a dimension beyond the record of true love and life with a remarkable man is the honesty with which she also records the darker side of a second marriage: the jealousy she felt for the years George had shared with his first wife; the awkwardness of moving into another woman's home; and the winning over of George's children—who, though adults, had nonetheless lost a beloved mother. A treat for Holmes fans and, for those less taken with the inspirational subtext, a realistic yet upbeat account of love and marriage in the sunset years.
Pub Date: April 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-41293-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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