A perfectly pitched tale of survival and the courage to move on.
In this sequel to the acclaimed Blackbird (2000), Lauck continues her disquieting, provocative memoir of a struggle to survive family treachery, abuse, and tragedy.
She picks up her story in 1975, when 11-year-old Jennifer and older brother Bryan are rescued by relatives from their cruel and capricious stepmother, Deb. Jennifer is sent to live with their dead father’s younger sister Peggy and her husband Dick in Black Sparks, Nevada. Aunt Peggy is a tightly wound woman subject to bursts of searing anger; Uncle Dick is a mean-spirited bully. Bryan, who has been taken in by Uncle Leonard and his wife Sylvia, an equally loathsome couple, now lives with them in Oklahoma. Jennifer tries to adjust to her new situation, as she helps out with baby Kimmy and does chores, but finds life little easier with Peggy and Dick than it was with Deb. The family moves to Washington State, where adolescent Jennifer finds her social life frequently limited by rigid strictures on socializing and by excessive work demands. She must call Dick Dad, and Peggy Mom, because they have officially adopted her. At the court hearing they promised to save Jennifer’s Social Security benefits so she could go to college, but when she graduates from high school, she learns they haven’t. She works two jobs while attending the local community college and moves out as soon as she can. But, despite her growing independence, a brief marriage, and a successful career as a journalist, she continues to be distressed by her troubled relationship with Bryan, who once claimed she made sexual advances to him. He enters a seminary, drops out, enrolls in college and then in 1984 commits suicide. By 2000, though happily remarried, Lauck decides to learn why Bryan killed himself, and in the search finds answers that explain and comfort.
A perfectly pitched tale of survival and the courage to move on.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-3965-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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