A remarkable look at the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems.
Journalist Fischer embraces her anguished past to champion underdogs both human and canine.
The title is misleading: The author did rescue several dogs belonging to an abusive neighbor, but that’s not the main focus of her debut memoir. In 1955, the Fischer family moved from the Bay Area to a suburban house with a pool in sunny San Fernando Valley. On the surface, everything seemed idyllic, until Mary’s maternal grandmother, diagnosed with stomach cancer, moved in with the family. When Mary’s mother succumbed to grief after Nanna’s death, her husband committed her to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. She would remain there, receiving multiple electroshock treatments, for the next decade. Her daughters would see her only twice during that time. Within months, their father sent Mary and her older sister, Kate, to the Ramona Convent boarding school, where they, too, would spend nearly a decade. Both girls suffered greatly from the stigma of having a “crazy” mother and from their removal from home. Later, they were allowed to live with their father while attending an all-girls Catholic high school. Out of these dysfunctional beginnings grew the author’s interest in righting wrongs. After floundering for a few years, she wrote a few stories for the local paper and moved to New York City to work as a freelancer. Four years later, she returned to Los Angeles for her big break. It was 1984, and the McMartin preschool molestation story had just made headlines. The McMartins were mostly vilified in the press, but Fischer was one of the very few journalists who questioned the bizarre accusations. After researching the story for months, she published her doubts in Los Angeles magazine. The thoughtful piece generated national attention and helped turn public perception in favor of the McMartins, who were finally—after years—acquitted. But during this time of professional blossoming, both of Mary’s parents died, and she completely severed ties with her sister.
A remarkable look at the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-20987-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
