Honest reflections on a life well-lived and how the next chapter looks to be even better.
The story of one woman’s reinvention after a 20-year career as an executive producer on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
After two decades working alongside one of the most famous women in the world, Salata, who eventually became the co-president of Harpo Studios and OWN, was ready for a change. Despite her impressively successful career, the author, moving toward her late 50s, felt unfulfilled, and she had the feeling that there was more to come. She had dreams that had been shelved for years and knew it was time to dust them off. First, however, she needed to reconcile issues with her past, primarily her weight fluctuations and her romantic relationships. “The reckoning—my reckoning, your reckoning—is not about self-judgment,” she writes. “It’s about hope. It’s the beginning of the stirring up of possibility. It’s the seed of the tiniest momentum that propels you beyond the ruts you are stuck in, the routine you have so dedicatedly constructed over decades.” The author blends moments of humor—e.g., her stint at a spa that featured “daily colonics,” a liposuction episode—with memorable advice she has absorbed from 20 years working with Oprah and her innumerable guests. Salata shares how she and her good friend, who was also looking for a life change, made a commitment to support each other unconditionally, and she stresses the importance of such valuable friendships, especially later in life. The author does meander a bit—she gives readers an inside look at life with her dogs and how she went from being an employee at a convenience store to eventually snagging her dream job—but on the whole, the narrative maintains a steady beat of useful advice coupled with honesty and wit, making this an empowering read for women of all ages but especially those 50 and above who are seeking a change.
Honest reflections on a life well-lived and how the next chapter looks to be even better.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274319-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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