An affecting collection of correspondence by a grieving woman seeking healing and peace.
A guide to dealing with the suicide of a loved one.
In 2008, after the sudden death of her boyfriend, who threw himself in front of a train in Mountain View, California, Neustadter spiraled into seemingly hopeless depression. However, she was unwilling to inflict similar pain and despair on her own loved ones by taking her own life. Most of the self-help books that she consulted left her with the feeling of being “talked to and coached at, not joined with,” particularly as her main desire was to reconnect with the person whom she lost. In a peculiarly 21st-century response to this feeling, she began writing emails to his former Yahoo! Mail account. The result is this book, the author’s nonfiction debut, in which she groups the emails she wrote into larger categories, such as “Despair,” “Shifting,” and “Beauty,” and adds her own extensive insights on emotional crisis and personal recovery, guided by her experience as a transpersonal psychologist. The author intends her book as “a companion in grief for any survivor left behind without his or her beloved,” and she supplements her personal reflections with a section on spiritual practices and grief resources. However, the heart of the book, and its most memorable element, are the messages to the author’s late boyfriend, which effectively flesh him out as an individual and underscore the immediacy of Neustadter’s pain after losing him: “You became everyone’s favorite,” she writes in an email about their early days together. “How could we resist your white Mickey Mouse hoodie no grown man should ever wear and your big, innocent blue eyes, so light, like the sky?” This device is an effective one, and every one of Neustadter’s readers will immediately sympathize with it; that said, this particular method of grieving may not be a healthy choice for everyone.
An affecting collection of correspondence by a grieving woman seeking healing and peace.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943006-88-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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