A deeply personal and revealing book about one woman’s attempt to find family, identity, and spiritual peace.
A memoir of survival and New Age spirituality that encompasses three generations of a working-class Polish-American family.
After debut author Stone was born in Wisconsin during 1969’s Summer of Love, she was meant to be given up for adoption, but her mother changed her mind at the last minute. During her childhood, she says, her father was absent and her mother was undependable, so her most stable influences were her down-to-earth Polish immigrant grandparents. Although Zofie and Loosha had strictly raised their own children with an iron hand and a leather switch, according to Stone, they treated her with persistent affection during her turbulent childhood. She says that she saw her parents’ failings—including neglectful parenting and addiction—all too clearly, but she admired their free spirits even as she suffered herself. She lost her virginity at 14, and she later felt the first stirrings of attraction to women, which would define her adult identity. Meanwhile, her mother, she says, stayed with an abusive boyfriend who almost killed her. As the author struggled to end what she saw as a family cycle of self-destruction, she was buoyed by a love of writing and music; she was also drawn to holistic spiritual practices, such as reiki and meditation, which helped her gain self-awareness. Overall, Stone’s memoir is disarmingly chatty in tone; at one point, for instance, she follows up a description of an Arizona landmark with the sentence: “The entire story is quite interesting if you want to google it.” She also occasionally inserts real-time comments: “(A dove is cooing as I write this—how awesome!)” This makes for an intimate reading experience, as do her vivid descriptions of colorful figures in her life, such as Zofie, who once expressed her anger at Loosha by throwing her own false teeth at him. Occasionally, the narrative seems overly detailed, as in a long description of the legal problems that arose after Stone’s mother’s death. However, readers will remain engaged as she attempts to transcend the obstacles in her life.
A deeply personal and revealing book about one woman’s attempt to find family, identity, and spiritual peace.Pub Date: May 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982203-98-6
Page Count: 154
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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