A harrowing account worth a hundred social-science textbooks.
The gritty memoir of a runaway who crawls out of the grave of our deepest urban nightmare.
Tina S. now helps the homeless, while Bolnick is a journalist and screenwriter who helped Tina get her former life into print. Tina's descent into homelessness begins with her father's death and a fire that drives her mother and siblings to a welfare hotel. The poverty and maddening fights in the one-room home with her mother's belligerent boyfriend drove her to escape, first with books, TV, cutting school, drinking alcohol and smoking reefer, and, finally, living in the surreal subterranean strata beneath Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. She stayed with a girlfriend she loved (who finally commits suicide) and a junkie boyfriend (who choked her for smoking crack while carrying his baby). Eventually Tina became a ward of Family Court—which proceeded to put her in the psycho ward of Bellevue for a month. The hospital cleaned up her grime, removed her lice, cured her wounds, and aborted her pregnancy, but the clean bed and regular meals (without bringing the day's panhandling or muggings to Burger King) couldn't keep Tina from returning to the streets—and below. There were lighter moments (such as trick-or-treating dressed as "bums" on Halloween) but in between the crack highs and harassment from family and the police were mostly a life of despair and deprivation. Tina got placed upstate in a boot camp–like detox and rehab center (a "Club Med for ex-junkies") and, after a shaky start, finally graduated from the program and earned her high school diploma. She even managed college and work. Her story is told with many flashbacks, and Bolnick narrates it with authenticity and sympathy.
A harrowing account worth a hundred social-science textbooks.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20047-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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