A sincere but tedious rehashing of the ``Baby Jessica'' saga by former adoptive mother DeBoer. In the summer of 1993, Baby Jessica, now known as Anna Schmidt, was returned to her biological parents after a two-year court battle that captured worldwide attention. Shortly after relinquishing her baby for adoption, birth mother Cara Schmidt began to mourn deeply. To cope with her pain, according to DeBoer, Cara attended a meeting of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), whose philosophy is that ``short of kidnapping and murder, this [separation from her baby] is the most horrible, unnatural loss a mother can endure.'' And so Cara Schmidt began her efforts to regain the baby she had hastily and conveniently surrendered. It is DeBoer's contention that had Cara not connected with CUB, Baby Jessica would be living a secure life with her adoptive parents. DeBoer strives for objectivity, but generally fails. Just as Cara and Dan Schmidt appear never see the DeBoers as anything more than temporary caretakers who have made a media circus out of their tragedy, the DeBoers see the Schmidts as mere ``baby machines'' who created a product that they initially abandoned. The result is ugly. Dan Schmidt is portrayed as a violent and negligent father whose court papers show that ``he has previously failed to raise or support his other two children.'' On the other side, DeBoer writes, a handful of criminal dirt committed by her husband, Jan, as a teenager is dug up and slung. While Jan considered fleeing the country with Jessica—a rare revelation here—Robby leapt to the media to publicize her plea that ``the bias of the courts towards biology'' would jeopardize her daughter's well-being. A sometimes absorbing, often superficial memoir that is far less meaty than the New Yorker's treatment of a year ago. (Two eight-page inserts of b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Redbook; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47458-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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