Engaging writing by an honest self-explorer.
Charismatic, albeit meandering memoir about the author’s discovery of love and self-acceptance while on a book tour.
The book was Chosen by a Horse (2006), an account of Richards’s relationship with an abused mare named “Lay Me Down” that finally got this reclusive animal lover and writing teacher into print after years of trying. The tour plucked her from isolation in upstate New York for what became a life-altering journey through small-town bookstores across the Northeast. Richards reconnected with friends and relatives she’d cut off during years of anxiety and low self-esteem, encounters that prompted her to examine the memories surrounding each of them and to grapple with her past. Bolstered by positive reviews and feedback from readers, her confidence grew. She was able to develop relationships and chat with strangers at her readings; she could even, when a self-assured older gentleman crossed her path, overcome her wariness of intimacy. Richards had experienced previous disappointments and was going through menopause, so theirs was not precisely a fairy-tale romance, even though she makes frequent use of the word “fate” when describing it. Self-conscious, cautious and analytical during the process of falling in love, the author fought feelings of being swept away. She shares all of this quite openly with readers in candid, if somewhat undirected prose that explores her fears, her past and her passions. Anxiety often takes the front seat in her narrative, which chronicles a struggle toward self-approval after a lifetime of feeling unwanted. Richards admits to being shy in person, but she’s clearly comfortable in the memoir format, which tends to foster an occasionally excessive amount of self-psychoanalysis. (She’s equally at ease talking about her “baggage” or her pets.) Fortunately, her charming, self-effacing humor keeps the tone light even when she’s examining darker feelings.
Engaging writing by an honest self-explorer.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56947-492-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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