Strength found through faith helps a woman combat personal disaster—will appeal most to Christian readers.
Family, friends and faith support a woman through personal tragedy.
As a young stay-at-home mother, Nielson was living the rewarding life she had always dreamed about. She had a loving husband who worked hard to support her and their four healthy children, a nice home, compassionate friends and extended family, a strong Mormon faith and a successful blog read by people around the world. Life only promised to get better when her thoughts turned to the possibility of another child. Then tragedy struck when Nielson and her husband, Christian, were badly injured in a plane crash. The author suffered disfiguring burns over 80 percent of her body and was in a coma for four months. Her husband suffered a broken back and burns on 40 percent of his body. Nielson recounts the ensuing months of struggle to regain some semblance of her former life. Graphic details of the numerous surgeries, physical therapy and daily existence as a severely burned patient are interconnected with the emotional roller coaster Nielson rode throughout her months of recovery. Her yearning desires were to tend to her children, husband and home, but she battled depression as she watched her children pull away from her disfigured body. Ultimately, self-determination, the encouragement of Christian, empathetic relatives and total strangers and Nielson’s devout faith helped her reclaim many aspects of her former life.
Strength found through faith helps a woman combat personal disaster—will appeal most to Christian readers.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4179-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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