Candid and inspiring.
Redbook editor-in-chief Morrison finds a bigger, more honest and balanced self amid the ruins of her marriage.
The author had recently been fired from her magazine job, had an infant son and a house in Brooklyn when her husband sighed and pronounced, “I’m done with this.” To his credit, he didn’t bolt or have an affair, but stayed put until they ironed out the divorce process—though it would take a toll. In a firm, bell-clear voice, Morrison charts her passage from misery to redemption. It wasn’t easy, and the story plays well on her confusion—circling, revisiting, contradicting—reading like a tumult of self-recrimination. Hardly a shrinking violet, she lived at a somewhat cool remove, not trusting happiness. She worked too much; nothing was ever enough; she was volatile and dramatic: “The distance between my brain and my mouth is very, very short.” Yet that brain is capacious and active, and Morrison emerges as a sympathetic character, overthinking, overwhelmed and not blind to the irony of “running a magazine all about women and love and marriage and stuff…Isn’t it rich?” There is plenty of unhappiness in these pages—not self-indulgent, but revelatory—and it all leads to genuinely hard-won epiphanies that are gratifyingly modest and useful for readers in similar situations—don’t marinate in anger; beneath fear is solid ground; fix the immediate problems, often things happen “just because”; optimism and forgiveness work wonders. If her comparisons are sometimes unsettling—“divorce is no virus; it’s lung cancer”—readers will get the drift.
Candid and inspiring.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9556-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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