A strange, split memoir.
This seemingly ordinary memoir takes a messianic turn.
The most striking thing about the first half of Chally’s debut is how not striking it is. In a series of readable, straightforward chapters, he tells the story of his first 34 years, from birth in Illinois to youth in Iowa. The narrative expands in 1988, when settling a petty larceny offense prompted him to take the option of entering the military; he was then stationed in Germany in support of Operation Desert Shield, then Operation Desert Storm. Chally met a young woman named Patricia and married her in Iowa in 1991, and they began to raise a family. He writes about the pain of losing his grandfather and the turtles and snakes he saw in the Mojave Desert; in a friendly but unremarkable way, he recounts such everyday things as working construction, going to rock concerts, getting a tattoo, being a young father, playing video games, and so on. Trouble gathers at the peripheries of his story: casual mentions of a sleepless week high on crystal meth, for instance, or mounting problems with the IRS over a large debt. Gradually, Chally approached rock bottom and was charged with public intoxication, at which point he reached out for support: “I then picked up the Bible and was asking God for help.” So far, it’s a narrative as old as Saint Augustine. But as Chally commenced studying the Bible, his life took a new, bizarre direction. He began seeing visions and delved deeply into the various numerological arcana of biblical writing. Not much later, he came to think of himself as an anointed messiah, a Chosen One bearing witness to mankind. His family members intervened and took him to the hospital, where, at the age of 35, he underwent a battery of psychological exams, the outcomes of which he faithfully reproduces here. The result is a curious dual narrative: on one side, the author steadfastly proclaiming himself to be mankind’s savior, a direct channel of God’s will; on the other side, a straightforward presentation of all the personal, psychological, and pharmacological reasons the world might disbelieve every word herein.
A strange, split memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4990-3148-5
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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