A tender, astute remembrance of overcoming grief and coming to terms with a parent’s flaws.
In this debut memoir, a father’s death reunites a mother and daughter but reignites familial tensions.
Gay remembers with precise detail the moment that her father was escorted out of her family’s Florida house, strapped to a stretcher. It was 1963, and the author was 18 years old, home from college for Thanksgiving. Gay’s father had suffered a mental breakdown that would forever change the family dynamic. For years to follow, her dad underwent treatment, including electroshock therapy, and was in and out of hospitals. Later, in the 1990s, while on sabbatical from her professorship in upstate New York, Gay flew down to Florida to spend time with her mother while her father spent his final days in assisted living. The author, the youngest child in a family with three other siblings, attempted to pick up the pieces of her fractured family after her father’s death and help her ailing mother. She came to recognize her mother’s hardships throughout her life—as a young child abandoned by both parents, and as a wife in a challenging marriage—and attempted to rebuild her relationships with her siblings. Meanwhile, her mother dealt with her grief by drinking and closing herself off from her children. Gay is a perceptive and compassionate narrator who manages to explore the gaps in everyone’s stories, including her own. As an English scholar and professor, she demonstrates a firm knowledge of how memoirs can be unreliable records of the past. She uses poetry, journal entries, and literary epigraphs to create an engaging metanarrative that explores how writing was vital to her process of overcoming trauma. She also writes of how she took on the task of breaking “the cycle of family dysfunction” and continued to reach out to her siblings after their mother’s death.
A tender, astute remembrance of overcoming grief and coming to terms with a parent’s flaws.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-874-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
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
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