A potent memoir of fragility and transcendence.
A courageous chronicle of abuse and redemption.
Danish activist, economist, and writer Andersen writes with striking clarity about the first two decades of her life. The book is not only a personal story of success in the face of ongoing trauma, but also an exploration of interventions that fell short. Following a chronological format, the author catalogs the unimaginable cruelties she endured during her formative years within family encounters, foster care, group homes, and orphanages. Each account includes missed opportunities for intercession on the part of someone with the capacity and opportunity to help her emerge from “a childhood characterized by betrayal, violence, and sexual assault.” Andersen’s candor about the trusted adults who repeatedly violated her illuminates painful yet vital insights about how to recognize and address the sometimes-contradictory and often undermining effects of childhood trauma. As she chronicles how she overcame years of extreme abuse to eventually thrive, Andersen’s revelations of intimate betrayals are often chilling, and many readers may be shocked or outraged. They should continue to read, however, because the book advances an important broader purpose: undergirding the value of survivors’ voices as instrumental to guiding future policies, advocacy, and change. Closing with descriptions of visits with her incarcerated brother and estranged mother, the author shows the difference that successful interventions can make. Her history of trauma shaped her lifelong passion for protecting vulnerable populations, and this tightly distilled collection of memories serves as an urgent call to public action and reform with regard to children’s rights. This is a triumphant, empowering book that calls into question current patterns of intervention and challenges popular conceptions about what it means to believe young girls. “Whether you’re a neighbor, a social worker, a schoolteacher, or a grandparent, you must and should act,” writes Andersen. “In this book, you’ll meet many people who acted on my behalf. I hope they will inspire you to reach out as well.”
A potent memoir of fragility and transcendence.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1590-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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