A religious debut memoir that carefully brings an engaging, complex family to life.
A pastor examines his childhood living with a disabled parent.
The author’s mother, Beverly “Bev” Mae Thornton, grew up in a modest family in Indiana. Warm, charismatic, and smart, she began, at age 16, to go out with John Thornton, a wealthier boy with a new Corvair. One night, they were in a terrible traffic accident, which would mark the rest of their lives with unanswered questions. Thornton, with co-author Kilpatrick, re-creates this time as if Thornton was actually there for his future mother’s painstaking recovery. She was left with limited motor skills and had violent mood swings that left her “groveling painfully on the floor” before her sisters. Racked with guilt, John slowly pushed his way back into her life and toward a shared future that perhaps they never really wanted, Thornton writes. All this carefully lays the groundwork for the story of his own experiences with his mother, primarily during his middle school years. He had a loving home life, but his mother’s disabilities also made it tumultuous, and he renders it all with the complexity it deserves. There are no easy answers to the difficulties surrounding disabilities, and Thornton and Kilpatrick reinforce that idea with each new story of embarrassment or, sometimes, terror. Well-balanced narration shows how the young Thornton slowly came to understand just how disheveled and odd their house was, particularly as his mother’s rage and erratic behavior intensified, he says, to include flying plates and threats with scissors. These moments are matched with equal instances of support, tenderness, and humor that help make Thornton’s home feel relatable; it also plays well into the narrative’s overall goal as a Christian testimony of faith. Although the author says that living with his mother brought constant surprises, he also writes, “It never struck me as strange that the woman holding scissors over us...was also my greatest example of what it means to live and love like Jesus.”
A religious debut memoir that carefully brings an engaging, complex family to life.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4964-1393-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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