An oversummarized memoir that shortchanges its subject’s inspiring life story.
Tiernan (Celebrate Japan, 1990) relates a life filled with turmoil, tragedy, persistence, and triumph.
The author, nicknamed Zip, begins her story by remarking that her friends and acquaintances have often asked her to write a memoir, and it isn’t a hard claim to believe. She was born near the beginning of World War II to a complicated Vancouver couple whose income troubles and demanding, punitive attitudes toward their children often overshadowed happier moments. Tiernan writes that she was first sexually assaulted as a 4-year-old by an unknown attacker and later again, repeatedly, by her father. As an adult, she also suffered hardships, including a divorce and the death of her young daughter. Her memoir is honest about the dark moments in her life, but it also stands as a testament to her perseverance. Her fundamental desire to thrive took her to a small logging camp, a Girl Guide center in Mexico, and homes all over Japan, often as a teacher or a guide to young people. This book is ultimately about surviving by being open to new experiences. But although Tiernan’s story is memorable, she describes it much too quickly, so that readers who’ve never met her personally will likely find it difficult to engage with it. She relates most episodes and observations in summary, with each chapter containing a series of paragraph-length memories; punctuation errors are also frequent, though not pervasive. A good memoir requires retrospection and introspection as well as a unifying narrative structure. These are sometimes present here, and when they are, the story can be quite moving; at one point, for example, she writes of her striking adult realization that her mother’s refusal to stop her father’s attacks was partially a result of the family’s economic dependence on him. However, the book doesn’t sustain this quality of retrospective analysis in most other chapters.
An oversummarized memoir that shortchanges its subject’s inspiring life story.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-9082-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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