Under the rubric of “inspirationally instructive,” Schultz offers a compact book. Yet, writing with a focused mind, he...
Writers have a way with words. In the case of this writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008, words are more likely to have their challenging way with him.
In a memoir as brief as a poem, Schultz (Failure, 2007, etc.) reflects on his dyslexia, a lifelong disability that was not diagnosed until late into his adulthood. He learned, with difficulty, to read at age 11. He was generally regarded as simply a stupid youngster. His mother had faith that her only child was truly bright, but his father was not helpful. The boy’s different neurological wiring produced a lonely, unresponsive child, and he was invited by his school’s administration to leave. And yet the poet survived, learned to process information and to read and write—though it’s not easy, even now. Schultz would like, mostly, just to be left alone to cogitate in his own way. Reading still does not come quickly. The author loves books, he writes, “except actually reading them.” Yet he demonstrates a lambent, odd contact with words: “Anything whispered, insinuated or abbreviated becomes in my mind a mumble-jumble bargain-basin [stet] gibberish.” His memoir, jogged into realization when he followed his Pulitzer Prize with an address at a school for the learning disabled, was not effortless. Today he heads a school that teaches writing. The author recognizes that his teenage son shares the same diagnosis, but this is his own story, not his child’s. Is the very notion of a dyslexic author an anomaly? How does the mind of a dyslexic work? Here, at least, are the answers for one man alone.
Under the rubric of “inspirationally instructive,” Schultz offers a compact book. Yet, writing with a focused mind, he dilates at length on the struggle within that mind.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07964-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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