A genial volume about a fun approach to showing others how much they mean to you.
How writing letters helped the author better appreciate her life.
When freelance writer Kho (The Family Mix: Essays on Family Life From MidlifeMixtape.com, 2013) turned 50, she decided to mark the year by writing 50 letters to her family, friends, and anyone else who had motivated or guided her in her life. One of the first letters she wrote was to her father, an act that gained further significance when he was diagnosed with cancer. Through the act of writing, the author discovered forgotten moments that have shaped her life, making her even more grateful for having lived them, including those that caused pain. When she was done writing, she printed out copies of all the letters so she could read them and relive her thoughts, which reinforced the feelings of love and bounty that she obtained from these people and events. Kho’s personal story is intertwined with guidelines on how to start your own letter-writing project. She lists the obvious choices for such letters—among others, parents, siblings, spouses, children, extended family—but also provides other interesting choices, including a doctor or dentist, favorite artist or musician, or even an ex-partner. She notes that while many of these letters may never be sent to the recipient for one reason or another, it does not negate the positive effect of writing it. Kho also moves beyond people and includes places, hometowns, hobbies, ideas, etc. The last letter, she writes, should be to yourself as you think about all the previous letters you’ve written. Although emails, texts, and tweets have taken over much of life, this old-fashioned method of communication has the potential to increase one’s happiness as well as that of the recipient. Kho’s idea is simple and quaint and will appeal to those seeking to understand “the importance of expressing appreciation.”
A genial volume about a fun approach to showing others how much they mean to you.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7624-6845-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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