Readers struggling with depression will likely find comfort and solidarity in this account.
In this debut memoir, a musician offers a brief meditation on loss and grief, explaining how songs helped heal his heart.
Mallman’s panic attack started a year and a half after his mother’s death in an accident—a delayed reaction. A doctor told him: “Sometimes the brain waits to process a trauma.” Nothing seemed to help; even some of his favorite music became “terrifying” to him in its sadness. The author decided to make a “Happiness Playlist” of inspiring and cheerful songs to try to help break him out of his funk. The playlist included Bob Marley, the White Stripes, Pharrell, and Gorillaz. His therapist suggested that he “surround” himself with people who would “lift” him up. A few weeks later, a woman named Annie came into his life. He listened to his playlist nearly exclusively as he battled depression through the fall and winter months, bantering with an eclectic group of friends and artists in the Minneapolis scene and celebrating Thanksgiving at home with his father. Many of the interactions seem slight—going to the mall with Annie; glibly commenting on an art exhibition to his friend Eugene. But it was all done to keep Mallman from dwelling on his mother’s death. And it seemed to work. The author’s epiphanies are somewhat esoteric, and there is no one moment where he declares victory over sadness. It comes in small bursts, as when he’s writing songs: “Make certain to sing through your mouth from your heart, not with your mouth from nowhere.” Perhaps as a result of his musical background, his prose also delivers staccato, declarative lines: “The asphalt beneath us is fresh with sleet. It sprays the surrounding cars as we speed by them. My window doesn’t close tight. A whistle sings in my left ear. Everywhere is music.” While the prose is economical, it can feel terse until the rhythm settles in. Overall, observing Mallman fighting grief feels like watching a fishing bobber battling a strong current. Still, this book should offer solace to anyone grappling with a similar situation.
Readers struggling with depression will likely find comfort and solidarity in this account.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9863607-3-2
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Think Piece Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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