A bold, courageous book by a woman who transforms mental illness into an occasion for activism.
An Iranian-American political activist and writer’s memoir of how she came to terms with her bicultural heritage and bipolar disorder.
When Huffington Post and Ms. blogger Moezzi was born in the United States in 1979, her fate was sealed—at least, according to theocrats who took over the country her Iranian doctor parents left behind. “I was both Westoxified (in the Ayatollah’s words) and highly inclined to lose my mind,” she writes. Unlike the children of those parents who stayed in Iran, Moezzi grew up affluent and surrounded by a huge extended family of other Persian exiles. But at 18, when her “westoxified” body rebelled against her for two years, Moezzi was forced to deal with both a life-threatening case of pancreatitis and what appeared to be a case of depression. Surgery seemed to cure her of both ailments, and her life resumed its charmed course. Moezzi traveled to Montana to spend a joyful summer (“I was sure that if God lived anywhere, it had to be Montana”) reconnecting with her Muslim faith, unaware that her euphoria was a manifestation of mania. She graduated from college and went to law school, where she developed an interest in the politics of Islam and also attempted suicide. Moezzi’s battles with her “mutinous mind” were far from over, however. While campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, she experienced an even more severe mental breakdown that stemmed from full-blown mania. The author’s candor about her experiences in and with the medical establishment is bracing. Physical illness elicits sympathy, cards and flowers; however, she writes, “if you have mental illness, you get plastic utensils, isolation and fear.” Yet Moezzi knows that she has been lucky. Life in Iran—and possibly in and out of the Iranian jails that make “American psychiatric hospitals look idyllic”—would have been far worse.
A bold, courageous book by a woman who transforms mental illness into an occasion for activism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58333-468-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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