Moran’s thoughtful, highly readable, and provocative treatise shines a necessary light on a dark and underdiscussed topic.
Leaving her Dublin home and dysfunctional family at 14, Moran became homeless before she turned to prostitution to survive. Her stirring memoir chronicles her seven-year journey on the streets and in the brothels and examines the costs to society and her soul.
The author’s experience convinced her of several things. First, she realized that prostitution is a collective experience among the women caught in this tragic lifestyle, and second, the job is never glamorous. On the second page, Moran clearly states the goal of her book: “exposing prostitution for what it really is…the illumination that comes from shining a light in dark places.” Writing down her story took the author 10 years. The first section of the memoir details Moran’s dismal childhood, complete with social exclusion, economic hardships, parental mental illness, and lack of social advantages. These conditions helped to create the foundation for her entry into prostitution. In the second section, the author skillfully debunks the myths perpetrated by society and the media about prostitution—e.g., the high-class hooker or the control prostitutes supposedly wield or pleasure they experience. The final section recounts Moran’s struggle to escape the lifestyle and re-enter larger society. The author’s writing style is restrained yet piercingly clear and forceful. In each section, she dissects the harmful effects of prostitution to herself and the women and girls she came to know. Though the physical abuse she encountered was significant and terrifying, the severe emotional turmoil has been even more difficult to bear. Today, the author still struggles with overcoming the denial of “the reality of her own experience.” If at times somewhat repetitive, this minor quibble takes nothing away from the author’s discussion of a subject that needs more attention.
Moran’s thoughtful, highly readable, and provocative treatise shines a necessary light on a dark and underdiscussed topic.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-35197-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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