A lucid, sweetly sentimental testament to growing up different.
Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Page (Journalism and Music/Univ. of Southern California) reflects on his bizarre childhood and the late Asperger’s diagnosis that brought a certain measure of clarity to his memories.
Though the author wasn’t diagnosed until he was in his mid-40s, it was clear from his early childhood that something distinguished him from the other children. Asperger’s, a disorder that falls on the autism spectrum, is characterized by, among other things, a pervasive difficulty in connecting with other people, the ability to amass astonishing amounts of what some might call minutia and, if the individual is lucky, a strikingly high level of intelligence. Page was one of the lucky ones, and so the loneliness stemming from being the only two-year-old Maurice Ravel devotee in his suburban neighborhood was perhaps mitigated by having the wit to (occasionally) engage others in his passions. At age 13, he became the subject of Iris and David Hoffman’s documentary, A Day with Filmmaker Timmy Page, in which the juvenile auteur closely directs his childhood friends in The Fall of a Nation, a story of children taking over the world. Because his precocity could not be channeled in any activity that didn’t interest him, Page floundered through school, experimenting heavily with drugs, often failing courses and struggling with loneliness and depression. His memoir is also the story of a man who, having to work extra hard to make friendships, is reluctant to let them go. Throughout, Page is animated by his visceral, passionate love for music and writing.
A lucid, sweetly sentimental testament to growing up different.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52562-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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