Roots of neurosis dug from a darkened, long-ago room.
Prolific magazine writer Stacey, whose praiseworthy debut (Consumed, 1997) examined America’s obsession with food, resurrects from Victorian medical annals the clamor and intrigue once surrounding a celebrated case.
Mollie Fancher, a pretty teenager invalided in a gruesome Brooklyn street accident in 1865, eventually claimed to have gone entirely without eating for more than a dozen years, much to the outrage of contemporary medical poobahs and the delight of her exploitative hometown newspapers. The reader is advised early on that the key to the mystery is how Mollie actually managed to eat on the sly—a question that remains unanswered. Still, other mysteries accrue thick and fast as Stacey shifts perspective and Mollie becomes a metaphor for feminine hysteria and all it comprised in the Victorian era. She was, after all, perhaps the first tabloid anorexic, not to mention any shrink’s potential life’s work with her claims of second sight (while professing total blindness), clairvoyance, and presentation of multiple personalities—not to mention the nine years she said had been erased from her memory. The author has diligently done her homework on all aspects of the case and is not about to jeopardize her investment by understating any of them: readers, who may feel they have bitten off more than they want to chew, must wait for a number of pithy digressions before Mollie’s case gets wrapped up. For example, St. Catherine of Siena’s well-documented (and ultimately fatal) fasts in search of God trigger an analysis of 14th-century female behavior leading to the devilishly provocative conclusion that the Medieval Church may have anointed a string of anorexics as saints. Contemporary personalities are introduced with what often seem dossiers too full relative to their peripheral impact, but, in the end, the zeitgeist has been fully illuminated while Mollie’s secret motives provide grist for psychiatric speculation.
Roots of neurosis dug from a darkened, long-ago room.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58542-135-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
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