Fans of this eloquent and introspective author will welcome this innermost chronicle of his history, passions, and the keys...
A distinguished psychotherapist reflects on his life and fulfilling career.
After a prolific string of publications including fiction, nonfiction, and collections of case files from his practice, Yalom (Emeritus, Psychiatry/Stanford Univ.; Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy, 2015, etc.) turns his perspective inward. Braided throughout client profiles are colorfully drawn anecdotes of his younger days as a self-proclaimed “disturber of the peace” whose disrespect and rebelliousness were always assigned primary blame for any unrest within the family household, including his father’s chest pain. Yet these are characteristics he regrets now, as an adult, as well as not being able to connect more emotionally with his frugal immigrant parents before time ran out. Valiantly leaving home for medical school meant seriousness and discipline, both of which Yalom mastered, even while making room for love. In smoothly conversational prose, the author ruminates on anger, his Jewish identity and the “ruins of my own religious education,” the “encounter groups” of the 1960s, the evolution of his relationship with wife Marilyn, a stint in the Army, international sojourns, and his psychiatry practice, which eventually landed him at Stanford. In the most touching chapters, Yalom chronicles how he has wrestled with the integrative role that death plays in the everyday lives of his patients (as well as with his own mortality). At 86, the author, an avid bicycler and poker enthusiast, still writes daily and sees patients in his San Francisco apartment. The author believes their intimate histories affect how he personally views his present life and memorializes his past, a notion that fortifies much of this fecund memoir. “My clients’ memories more often trigger my own,” he writes, “my work on their future calls upon and disturbs my past, and I find myself reconsidering my own story.”
Fans of this eloquent and introspective author will welcome this innermost chronicle of his history, passions, and the keys to unlocking a fruitful life.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09889-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
