Insightful and refreshingly honest, if readers can get past the therapeutic jargon.
A memoir of strenuous soul-searching by a former Exxon executive who failed to find fulfillment in a successful corporate career.
There are two main threads between the covers of this slender volume: one, a story the author hopes will help other career executives balance their work and personal lives; the other, the story of a scientist who eventually accepts nonscientific therapies during a journey of self-discovery—a journey takes him through a series of oddly named experiences, such as a class named “The White-Hot Yoga for Awakening and Awakened Agents of Change,” a support group called “Temple of the Beloved” and a program called “Waking Down in Mutuality. Those who doubt the efficacy of those therapies may find it difficult to make it through Epperly’s story of what happened after he lost his executive position, at age 51, during a major corporate downsizing that ended his distinguished 29-year career at Exxon. After Exxon, Epperly continued his chemical engineering work at two other companies, focusing on innovative ways to reduce industrial acid-rain pollutants, before retiring at 61. He achieved professional and financial success, but a painful childhood left him with feelings of inadequacy. As an only child, he witnessed frequent fights between his mother and alcoholic father, and Epperly feared that his mother might abandon him if she decided to flee the marital hardship. That fear was the “core wound” Epperly identified after many therapeutic experiences, including channeling, meditation, visualization and spiritual self-assessment. He credits his wife with leading him on the journey of self-discovery that directed them away from the Presbyterian Church in which they were active and into secular therapies. “She longed for a deeper intimacy in our marriage,” he writes, “something that I was clueless about at the time.” A less-personal narrative style would most likely be more useful to executives seeking the work-life balance that eluded Epperly, and the fact that some passages read like advertisements for seminars the author attended doesn’t help the book’s appeal, either.
Insightful and refreshingly honest, if readers can get past the therapeutic jargon.Pub Date: June 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989487900
Page Count: 142
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2013
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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