Exotic, but not engaging.
A lackluster account of an unusual childhood.
Kuegler’s parents were missionaries, and she spent most of her childhood in a remote jungle with the Fayu tribe of Papua, New Guinea. The first three-quarters of this book describes Kuegler’s youth. Her parents quickly earned the respect of the Fayu, and Kuegler and her two siblings made friends. They were well-educated by her mother, but had lots of time to play. Even the lack of hospitals and doctors didn’t trouble the Kueglers: Malaria was a “constant companion,” but, for the most part, Kuegler’s mother could handle all medical crises. The book’s narrative tension—insofar as there is any—comes when the author returns to the West, first for a lengthy stay with her family, and then, as a young woman, alone. Kuegler had no memory of Germany, and she found her first extended visit there confusing and overwhelming. The children were especially perplexed by the seemingly endless food supply. When she returned to Europe as a teenager, things were even more complex. She attended a boarding school in Switzerland, where she had Western friends for the first time. Her new companions taught her to shop and flirt, and helped her style her hair. She also discovered sex, and shortly after graduating, found herself pregnant. The memoir’s last dozen pages are exceedingly unsatisfying: Kuegler summarizes her pregnancy, her first failed marriage, a suicide attempt and a spiritual epiphany. In short, Kuegler describes her childhood in idyllic terms, but rushes over the really interesting conflict: her struggle as an adult to adjust to the West. The prose is elementary, even plodding—there’s nothing lyrical here, and at times, it feels like an account of childhood written for children.
Exotic, but not engaging.Pub Date: March 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57906-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
