Manning, a clinical psychologist who wrote lyrically and humorously about her battle with depression in Undercurrents (1995), here offers by contrast the pedestrian memoir of a self- acclaimed casualty of Catholicism. Manning divides her book into short sections on such topics as ``Sin,'' ``Hell,'' and ``Absolution,'' breezing from one bland reflection to the next about Catholic girlhood. There's much stock scenery here: the tyrannical nuns and their heated warnings about the danger of boys looking up one's skirt; the brainwashing prolife lectures and scary films about childbirth; the lousy taste of the host at the First Communion. Sex was evil and impure: ``The fact that women who endured twelve to fourteen years of Catholic School are not all virgins or prostitutes is a miracle.'' The author skims the surface of the church's problems for (and with) women. Her text often seems more like the record of a pleasurable, meandering conversation among women exchanging anecdotes about their childhood than a measured, reflective study. Manning wants to be transgressive by speaking up as an enlightened woman, yet this is as G-rated as it comes. Her book lacks the irony, the wit, and certainly the richness of Mary McCarthy's memoir of Catholic girlhood, which was filled with twisted characters and real Gothic horrors, powerfully described. Manning's experiences sound mild by comparison. In fact, she seems so little held by her subject matter that she sometimes glides into curiously tangential vignettes: One night she follows a yuppie couple in the supermarket, seething resentfully as they select their gourmet items while she shuffles along with her fiscally challenged cart. Some of Manning's mild recollections might work at essay length; overall, the book lacks substance and freshness. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-251311-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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