Lightweight but honest and inspiring.
A blogger’s humorous account of how she transcended her “nervous nature…bookish upbringing and midlife responsibilities” to discover her courage.
Anker grew up “eating fear of failure like the breakfast of champions.” But as she neared her 40th birthday, she became aware that her timidity was not only limiting her, but also her two small daughters. So Anker dedicated herself to finding her “nerve.” She began her project by jumping into the murky waters of her anxieties by using the diving board at a community swimming pool. Mortally afraid of moving water, she learned how to boogie board in the Atlantic and surf the ice-cold waters of a half-frozen Lake Michigan. On land, she learned how to ride the bicycles that had secretly terrified her and speak in front of an audience without crumpling. As she let go of her anxieties, she uncluttered her own personal space, since “holding on to…belongings was tantamount to fear.” Anker also came into contact with others who were dealing with phobias similar to her own—such as fear of driving or heights—or who were helping others move beyond their own psychologically imposed limitations. Not only did Anker realize that she was not alone in her suffering, she also learned that, as both a person and a parent, the most important thing she could do was to “keep [her] eye on where [she] want[ed] to go” rather than listen to her inner “Greek Chorus” of self-doubt. By changing herself, she could also transform everyone with whom she came into contact: “we start to shimmer, and the world is never the same.”
Lightweight but honest and inspiring.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-605-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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