An eloquently searching and intelligent memoir.
A Bangladesh-born author, actor, and speaker tells the story of her search for self-acceptance and a life lived across continents.
Zaman grew up watching her brilliant, college-educated mother fold in on herself “like an origami bird.” Her father, a Zamindar from a politically prominent Bangladeshi family, expressed his love harshly and bullied her mother. He moved the family from Bangladesh to Hawaii and then Thailand in pursuit of his career with the United Nations. From him, the author learned that men dictated what women could and could not do. From a male cousin who went unpunished for trying to molest her, she learned that men could sexually abuse women and not face any consequences. Zaman eventually rebelled by cutting her hair short, becoming anorexic, and sleeping with men of her choosing. She left for college in the United States, studying theater and women’s studies, and then went to New York with aspirations to become a stage actor. Meanwhile, her mother, who had procured a career of her own, divorced her father and remarried a man who respected her independence. The author married as well, but her husband was “unkind and often dangerous,” just like most of her old lovers. She divorced him and began mending the difficult relationship she had with her father. Cautious of involvements, Zaman fell in love with a self-help guru who believed that an “alpha [male]” should never let a woman “feel too secure in his affections for her.” After leaving him, the author went to Oregon to live with her mother and stepfather and “get myself sorted.” Within the space of the loving family she never had, the author let go of her inner disciplinarian and began writing to understand—and ultimately release—the self who had been her “imaginary best friend.” In this candid book, Zaman not only celebrates her quest to define herself and her voice, but also to find health, self-love, and wholeness.
An eloquently searching and intelligent memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948705-11-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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