Raw, tender, and uniquely envisioned.
A debut memoir that explores a woman’s relationship with her family and dead brother through the cars that came into their lives.
Vehicles seemed to mark every major event in Indiana native Stephenson’s family. Her father began dating her mother just after he bought a used Chevy; her mother lost both her father and beloved boyfriend to automobile accidents; and her younger brother Matthew was born just after her parents settled on a Toyota sedan to replace the Fiat Stephenson’s father had bought on a whim. Later, after Matthew committed suicide in 2000, the author took possession of his truck, “the only thing of material value my brother left behind.” The author begins the book around the time of her childhood, before her parents “bootstrapped [their] way over the poverty line and into a facsimile of a middle-class lifestyle.” Her most important relationship was with Matthew, whose love/hate feelings for her were “complicated at best.” Their shared desire to escape the Midwest took them on road trips and to schools outside Indiana and brought them into contact with the vehicles—Saabs, Fords, Vanagons—that defined their respective youths. But where Stephenson’s travels led to her finding a stable husband and her calling as a writer, Matthew’s travels led down dark roads that included alcohol and drug abuse and a brief, destructive marriage to Corey Parks, the notorious bass player for Nashville Pussy. Yet no one in the family knew just how troubled her brother was until he took his life. Shaken to the core, Stephenson freed herself from the wreckage of Matthew’s suicide by driving straight into the heart of family dysfunction and coming to terms with the unwitting role she and her family had played in his death. Lyrical and eloquent, Stephenson’s book is a journey of pain, beauty, and healing that also celebrates the life of her tragically misunderstood brother.
Raw, tender, and uniquely envisioned.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-76829-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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