An intriguing and informative look at the challenges of disability.
Rudnick’s debut memoir examines her complicated relationship with her developmentally disabled sibling as well as her own tumultuous path to self-acceptance and fulfillment.
The author was born in New York City in 1944 to German immigrant parents, and her sister, Edna Jane Wile, was born a year later. As young children, the girls were inseparable, but when they entered school, it became increasingly apparent that Edna was lagging behind the other kids. She could read, but she couldn’t comprehend abstract concepts; she was mobile, but she was unable to walk with a normal gait; and she didn’t have any friends. The author, however, excelled in school and had an active social life. Increasingly, she felt guilty about leaving Edna behind; she saw her sister as a visual manifestation of her family’s differentness, she says, which embarrassed her and made her angry and confused. When Edna was 14, the girls’ mother found a camp/residential school in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which would cater to her special needs. “Except for vacations, we would never live together again,” Rudnick writes. The author soon discovered that she had her own, hidden disability—she’d been born without a uterus and with an incomplete vaginal canal. It was a devastating blow, she says, that affected the rest of her life. Rudnick is a talented writer, often displaying a keen ability to capture emotional intensity through concise prose. For example, she reveals at the memoir’s outset that “Edna was my most treasured companion” and “almost every night I crawled into her bed. With her soft skin, she was so cuddly, so squeezable. I felt safe when I was close to her.” As a result, readers are likely to be unsurprised that Rudnick eventually became a practicing psychotherapist. That said, the passages describing the author’s four marriages and three divorces sound clinically detached by contrast.
An intriguing and informative look at the challenges of disability.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-515-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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