Simply told, more in sorrow than in anger: a personal chronicle of the darker side of faith and family.
A young woman who ran away from her Old Order family to marry the man she loved critiques the customs, beliefs, and childrearing practices of this ultra-strict Amish group.
Raised on a farm in Iowa, Garrett briefly describes the history of the Amish and their way of life before relating how in 1996 she eloped with Ottie Garrrett and moved to Kentucky. The Old Order Amish, who fled religious persecution in Germany in the 18th century, do not own cars or use telephones or electricity. The women must wear long, dark dresses held together by pins (buttons are considered a sign of vanity) and cover their heads at all times. Education ends in the eighth grade; the children then work on the family farms. The religion preaches rigid adherence to the Bible (men are the head of the house, children must obey their parents) and punishes transgressors by shunning or excommunication. The fifth of seven children, 15-year-old Ruth met much older Ottie in 1989, when he came into town for a visit. Her grandfather asked the visitor to chauffeur the local Amish, who did not drive themselves but did take automobile trips to see families and sights. Recently graduated from school and determined not to marry an Amish man—she saw her father’s dictatorial treatment of her mother as typical—the young girl was soon attracted to Ottie. The feeling was mutual, and they married in defiance of her family and the community, which called all outsiders “the English” and regarded them as depraved. Garrett describes her family’s hurtful reactions and her halting adjustment to the outside world: she bought dresses without trying them on because she did not know that stores provided fitting rooms. Excommunicated by the Amish, she found in the local Lutheran church a warm welcome and a loving God.
Simply told, more in sorrow than in anger: a personal chronicle of the darker side of faith and family.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052992-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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