An impassioned call to action and a vulnerable family portrait of neurodiversity.
A collective portrait of activist Greta Thunberg's family, encompassing not only climate change, but also issues of mental health.
In this moving text, Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman, her husband, Svante Thunberg, and their daughters, Greta and Beata, stitch together vignettes about "burned-out people on a burned out planet.” Before Greta stepped into the public eye with her 2018 strike outside the Swedish Parliament, she had fallen into depression. Ernman details the end of her music career, when Greta refused to eat or speak. Through distilled recollections, she elucidates how autism and selective mutism unfolded in her household, with all its initial hardship, and how Swedish society views spectrum disorders in general. When Greta was finally diagnosed with Asperger’s and OCD, and Beata with ADHD and other conditions, the family found a measure of solace. But they still struggled: “We scream. We kick down doors. We scratch. We pound walls. We wrestle. We cry. We ask for help and we somehow endure.” The narrative delivers a potent, challenging, and heartening portrayal of a family's struggle to hold it all together. The text is more problematic when it conflates environmental issues—such as sustainability and the climate crisis—with mental health problems, positing that society’s prioritization of economy over ecology has led to increasing isolation and desperation. While provocative, the argument feels grounded in simplified conviction. Passages about carbon emissions, damage wrought by air travel, the failure of world leaders to take charge, and related issues are unabashedly alarmist and valuable. Because these elements echo Greta's many speeches, they come off as repetitive in the book. The buildup to Greta's strike—and the strike itself—is an inspiring depiction of the teen who has become a leader on the world stage and of the family who supports her behind the scenes. It also represents a courageous triumph over many of her demons.
An impassioned call to action and a vulnerable family portrait of neurodiversity.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313357-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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