Some tediously detailed sections and an impressionistic structure weaken the overall impact of Hustad’s memoir.
A daughter of evangelical missionaries reflects on the complexities of faith.
Hustad (How to be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work, 2008) was born in Minneapolis, where her family had relatives and roots. But her parents felt a religious calling, and soon, young Megan and her sister, Amy, were transported to the Caribbean island of Bonaire, where her father took a post with Trans World Radio, broadcasting God’s word over shortwave. Bonaire, flat and salt-rich, “offered excellent conductivity for radio signals,” heard as far north as Canada and south to the Amazon. After a few years on the buggy, soggy island, the family returned to Minnesota, awaiting a new assignment: this time, to Holland. When Megan protested that she didn’t want to live in a foreign country, her mother replied, “That’s too bad….Because you live in one now.” Alienated from 1980s American culture, Hustad’s parents felt out of place in Holland, as well, where the supervisor of TWR was intent on making Christian views relevant in “the marketplace of ideas.” Maybe phone-in programs would help; maybe market research: “[B]ad programming,” he insisted, “placed a strain upon the sovereignty of God.” When her father’s conflict with the supervisor proved unresolvable, the family was offered another post in Sri Lanka. Instead, they returned to Minnesota. Amy, 18, had long before rejected her family’s life of near poverty and cultural isolation. Megan, 12, still went weekly to the church youth group “because I was not prepared not to. I was initially expected to be better at God but everyone quickly realized that I was not.” Escaping to New York City as soon as she could, Megan met people “who associated religious belief with rank stupidity” and even pathology, leading her to reconsider her own complicated connections to faith.
Some tediously detailed sections and an impressionistic structure weaken the overall impact of Hustad’s memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-29883-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
PROFILES
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
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