An intimate and honest memoir of survival after trauma.
A former Southern Methodist University track star’s account of how she survived a brutal rape that changed her life.
Going to the United States to study on a full scholarship was a dream come true for the Norwegian-born Kørra. In 2009, just as she was finishing her third semester at SMU, the young runner was kidnapped and raped by three men. The author vowed that her life would go on just as it had before the attack, but in the two years that followed, she found out just how difficult it would be to keep that promise to herself. Kørra describes in detail her struggles with the extreme fear and insomnia that plagued her in the aftermath and the AIDS anti-viral drugs she was forced to take to protect her brutalized body against possible infection. She sought therapy only to discover that having to retell the story of her rape was “overwhelming.” Journalists in Dallas hounded her for her story to the point that she and her roommates had to move to another location in secret, and friends in Norway she had known for years stayed away, unsure of how to treat her. Kørra’s athletic performance suffered for more than a year; so did a relationship she had, which eventually ended. But Kørra was also fortunate in that she had a strong support system that included her family as well as coaches, friends, and teammates in Dallas. When her rapists were captured not long after the attack, her support structure helped her through the wrenching court appearances that followed and did not conclude until 2011. Kørra speaks from a socially and educationally privileged position, which may somewhat limit her memoir’s appeal, but both the book and the foundation she later started to help rape survivors are clear expressions of a personal strength and integrity that are profoundly admirable.
An intimate and honest memoir of survival after trauma.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3962-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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