An inspirational, unsentimental tale of overcoming the odds.
An account of one woman’s turbulent childhood and her paranormal awakening.
Canfield’s parents Ralph and Lorraine meet as teenagers in South Buffalo and quickly create a large family when children keep arriving despite the pair’s inability to care for them, either financially or emotionally. Even when Ralph had steady work at an arms plant during World War II, money was tight, and as work dries up after the war, the family’s situation deteriorates. Ralph and Lorraine argue and drink too much, leaving the children to largely fend for themselves. The family splits up, and Nancy Lee is sent to live with her aunt and abusive uncle for a short stint before being placed in numerous foster homes and eventually an orphanage. After a few years, the family reunites underneath one roof, but Nancy Lee is much changed, scarred by her experiences. She eventually marries the first man she meets, who is 23 to her 17, out of a clear desire to escape the highly toxic and dysfunctional family home. By 20, Nancy Lee is the mother of three children and the wife of a man who physically and verbally abuses her. Knowing that she is trapped, she repeatedly tells her husband that one day she will leave him. After 20-plus years, Nancy Lee finally keeps her promise and files for divorce, explaining that a key component in her ability to make such a bold move is the inner strength she has developed through harnessing her paranormal sensitivities; Nancy Lee is a highly sensitive person with psychic abilities, signs of which are seen throughout her childhood. The author’s tell-it-like-it-was memoir is moving because of its lack of sentimentality; she neither demonizes nor idealizes her parents and depicts the people in her life so vividly that at times it’s easy to forget that this startling tale is nonfiction. While the paranormal details, coupled with some purple prose, may make the book hard for some readers to swallow, on the whole, Canfield’s story is an incredible account of childhood neglect and her power to triumph in a life riddled with obstacles.
An inspirational, unsentimental tale of overcoming the odds.Pub Date: June 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450231251
Page Count: 300
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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