A moving yet muddled personal story.
This debut volume of a mother’s memoir recounts her experience of turning to God for solace in grieving the death of her two-year-old son.
Beginning with her adolescence and moving forward to her son’s untimely death from complications relating to influenza, Taylor writes of her lifelong curiosity about death and the role that God plays in it. After the tragedy in her family, both issues intensified to a point of obsession for the author. At its heart, this story is as compelling, difficult and rewarding as any great personal memoir. Written long after the tragedy of her son’s death, Taylor views the events and circumstances of her life and that time with the practicality necessary to prevent the narrative from slipping into an eyeless, self-indulgent mess. The problem is that Taylor places this sensible approach in a much larger scope. In the introduction, she makes clear that the entirety of the book hinges on God and how He affects our ideas of life and death. This is a fine foundation for this type of memoir, but the author is too hesitant to truly sell the idea, probably because of her difficult experiences with “death in the family” books after her son’s passing. Taylor leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between God and mortality, which comes across as alarmingly indecisive for a woman who intends to focus dutifully on that exact relationship. While it’s refreshing to see such a devout woman allow others their opinions, the author could have made her points more forcefully. However, even with this shortcoming, she tells the story of her emotional survival after her son’s death with a confiding gusto that avoids bleak self-pity, becoming palatable and mature.
A moving yet muddled personal story.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-2848-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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