An edgy, thought-provoking, and informative insider’s view of a frequently misunderstood disability.
A debut memoir from a woman who found a unique remedy for the social anxiety caused by her lifelong stuttering.
G. isn’t the first person in her family to suffer from a disability, she says: “My father was born with hearing loss, as was his father and his father’s mother.” G.’s hearing was fine, but her stuttering was compounded by dyslexia, both of which became serious problems for her in third grade. Fortunately, her supportive parents were active in ensuring that she had the best instructors that the California educational system could offer. She would go on to graduate with a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and she later received a doctorate in psychology. At heart, G. is a teacher—she’s a community college professor—and she brings that skill to her memoir, detailing, in plain English, the scientific underpinnings of stuttering and how someone with speech difficulties may become, for example, a successful singer: “stuttering is thought to originate from somewhere in the left side of the brain, near the area that produces speech….on the right side of the brain, you have the areas that produce the functions of intonation or singing.” G. also writes of her passion for comedy; starting in, she bravely pursued stand-up comedy, and she still relishes performing at open-mike nights in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her often funny, salty, and justifiably angry prose articulates the frustrations that she faced as a stutterer in the “fluent” world, including the irritation of being interrupted during a word block, the psychological impact of being discounted and mocked, and the self-imposition of silence in an effort to make listeners comfortable. Some of the jokes that she includes here may work better in a live setting than then they do on the page, but others are sure to have readers laughing out loud.
An edgy, thought-provoking, and informative insider’s view of a frequently misunderstood disability.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-642-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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