A tender story gently told.
A child’s perspective on a family’s ordeal.
In her revealing nonfiction debut, Brown, who published a young adult novel, Hush (2010), under the pseudonym Eishes Chayil, recounts growing up Hassidic in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1980s and ’90s. Vividly capturing the voice of her younger self, she portrays an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community marked by piety, prejudice, and superstition and her loving family roiled by the mystifying, often terrifying, affliction of her younger brother, Nachum. “When I tried to share with him, he blinked, flailed his hands, and sometimes gave a piercing shriek,” Brown recalls, “and I didn’t want to play with him anymore.” The author wasn’t satisfied when adults told her that everything—including Nachum’s madness—was part of “God’s Grand Master Plan”; or that Nachum was crazy because her mother didn’t nurse him; or he must have been dropped on his head. Talmudic lore held that an angel, after imbuing an unborn child’s soul with holy knowledge, strikes him on the upper lip to erase that memory. “But sometimes,” Brown was told, “the angel strikes the upper lip too hard,” making it impossible for the child to remember anything, “even how to speak, how to say simple words. Such a child is born mad, like my brother.” The author felt cursed by her brother’s existence—not only the havoc he wreaked in the family, but because she believed that having a defective brother lessened a matchmaker’s chances of finding her a husband. Only her mother was convinced that Nachum could be helped. She took him to Israel, going from doctor to doctor in search of a diagnosis. The results were no more satisfying than the story of the angel: ADHD, psychosis, and chemical imbalance. Finally, one doctor diagnosed autism. Nachum improved dramatically after a few years in a special school, becoming, at last, the brother whom Brown could love.
A tender story gently told.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-40072-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
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