A touching rapprochement between mother and daughter, but much of the writing is murky and both narratives sound curiously...
The New Age odyssey of bestselling author Kidd (The Mermaid Chair, 2005, etc.) and her daughter Ann.
In alternating chapters, the mother-daughter team recounts their different but parallel journeys of self-discovery. Mom found guidance in the regenerative myths of Demeter, Persephone and the Virgin Mary, while Ann, feeling confused and rudderless in her early 20s, wondered whether the power of Athena could help her unearth life’s purpose. Sue, who grew up in upstate South Carolina and worked as a nurse during her early adult life, eventually found her writer’s voice and moved with her husband to Charleston. Ann attended Columbia College (in South Carolina) and resolved to study Greek history after an inspiring group trip to Greece in the late ’90s, but she was rejected from her ideal graduate program. During a subsequent trip to Greece to commemorate Sue’s 50th birthday and Ann’s college graduation, Ann felt depressed about her future just as Sue was hoping to find spiritual clues to the next phase of her life. Most of the book is devoted to their first trip to Greece in 1998, narrated first by Sue, then Ann, from Athens to Eleusis (the sanctuary of Demeter) to Ephesus, Turkey, where “Mary’s House” is located. Both mother and daughter continually sound the themes of autonomy and self-realization. Yet while Sue hit on her life’s mission to write a novel—which became the mega-selling The Secret Life of Bees (2002)—Ann returned home, got married and had a baby. Although she did find courage to apprentice as a writer, the letdown is palpable.
A touching rapprochement between mother and daughter, but much of the writing is murky and both narratives sound curiously alike—won’t deter the many fans of Mom, however.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02120-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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