A few good anecdotes, but with few insights.
Incomplete account of one woman’s experience growing up as a fundamentalist Christian.
Hartford Courant columnist Campbell was raised in Missouri as a member of the church of Christ (they were taught not to capitalize church). She describes herself in girlhood as a true believer, utterly devoted to Jesus and immersed in the life of her congregation. As time passed, she began asking questions about the role of her gender within her church and society. Coming upon the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the library one day, Campbell’s eyes were opened to the concept of feminism, changing her life forever. Despite holding on to her church involvement for a number of years, she eventually left organized religion. Though at times affecting and humorous, her memoir has a number of flaws. Campbell tends to dwell on particular events that highlight her personal insecurities and have little to do with the supposed subject matter. Several pages recall the night she spent as a sophomore at the homecoming game, hashing out her angst from that mundane moment. Though her faith background and her budding feminism color the event to some degree, readers are forced to act as therapists while the author relives her worries over being the only virgin (she thinks) in the homecoming court. Her tomboy status as a female athlete, her level of physical attractiveness and her inexperience with boys surface continually, revealing little new about such universal issues. Campbell also leaves out her entire transformation from churchgoing youth to “floater”: someone who does not attend worship but still believes in God. Although the author describes her personal experience of growing up in the church as characterized by fear and guilt, she displays an obvious nostalgia for her old faith. If it was so bad, why did she like it so much?
A few good anecdotes, but with few insights.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1066-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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