A haunting story with a triumphant conclusion.
Touching glimpse of a young life nearly lost and then redeemed.
In this brief but powerful memoir, film producer and novelist Halberstadt (The Pianist in the Dark, 2011) examines the day, at the age of 12, when she attempted suicide. The book opens with that fateful morning, as the young Parisian girl takes all the pills she can find in the cupboard, then goes to school, waiting to die. The bulk of the narrative explores the incidents leading up to her decision, while the ending relates events in the hours and days after she awoke in the hospital, her plan having only barely gone awry. Halberstadt’s story is a gripping work of psychological introspection, following the traumas and travails of a girl too ordinary to be noticed, yet too brilliant to fully accept that anonymity. As she saw herself, the author was the plain-looking, boring daughter of a good but distant father and thoroughly strict mother. She paled in comparison to her older, beautiful, charming, talented sister, who lorded that superiority over her. Only one person, her grandfather, cared about and understood her. When he died, all she wanted to do was join him. Distant and uncaring, her family tolerated her at best, verbally abused her at worst, until she felt the best thing she could do for everyone involved was to go away. After her suicide attempt failed, however, Halberstadt experienced a sudden rebirth, deciding to live and flourish. The author tells her story passionately, often in short, chopped sentences that underscore the import and weight of her preteen thoughts. She is matter-of-fact rather than melodramatic, giving the readers a sense of the resignation and alienation she felt as a girl.
A haunting story with a triumphant conclusion.Pub Date: July 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59051-531-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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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