I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I opened them and asked my seatmate for the time. We were still hours away, and I willed the seconds to pass, eveI closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I opened them and asked my seatmate for the time. We were still hours away, and I willed the seconds to pass, even as I had an image then of the death moment as a fracture that had split my life in two, and every minute, every mile, was a measure of the growing distance between me and the part of life I much preferred. Some ten years later, I'm still on that train.
The writing in this book is almost too good. In All the Lives We Ever Lived, Katharine Smyth intertwines a tale of the life and death of her father with wisdom she's gleaned from her favorite book, To the Lighthouse. It's a neat hook to hang a memoir on, but Smyth doesn't really need it. Perhaps this isn't surprising given that she reveres Virginia Woolf, but the personal (non-Lighthouse) parts of this book are so well done, vivid, eloquent, moving and (huge compliment from me) well-organized and cohesive, that all the Woolf stuff, interesting as it is, isn't really necessary. I would've happily read more about Smyth's own life instead! Still, as far as criticisms go, that's a pretty mild one. I genuinely did like all the explication of To the Lighthouse; I just liked the personal stuff more. Overall, I was really impressed by this. Recommended!...more
Sorry to have to say this, but Everything Happens for a Reason is a mess. This short book is a memoir of Kate Bowler's Stage IV colon cancer and how hSorry to have to say this, but Everything Happens for a Reason is a mess. This short book is a memoir of Kate Bowler's Stage IV colon cancer and how her diagnosis flies in the face of the "prosperity gospel"—the notion espoused by some Christians that as long as you believe in God and think positively, good things will happen for you, and therefore if something bad happens it's kind of your own fault. Was Kate Bowler previously a devotee of the prosperity gospel, or was she raised in that tradition? Why, no. She was raised in the Mennonite tradition. She's a professor at Duke divinity school and did her dissertation on the prosperity gospel, so she knows a lot about it, but has no actual personal lived experience with it at all. Analyzing a particular area of Christian belief in relation to her cancer might work for a short essay, but it doesn't work for a book-length memoir. Memoirs are supposed to be personal. Bowler discusses the prosperity gospel for so many pages, and after a while it just seemed pointless. She doesn't believe in the prosperity gospel herself, so what does it really have to do with anything?
The book otherwise just meanders. It touches on her Mennonite background and other religious traditions, talks quite a bit about how hot her husband (allegedly) is, goes over her past fertility issues and other health problems, mentions a high-profile article she wrote on her cancer diagnosis and the prosperity gospel and the various responses it received—aha! When I got to this part it all made sense: Bowler had written an article for the New York Times, it got a massive response, she got a book deal, and then had to stre-e-e-e-tch it out to book length. She's done this, but not successfully.
As other reviewers have mentioned, this is really much more a book about God and Christianity than it is a book about Bowler's cancer diagnosis. Given that she is a divinity professor, maybe I should have expected that. But the book started out with a harrowing section about her unexpected diagnosis and then went off in a hundred other directions, leaving me wondering how her surgery went and what her prognosis and treatment plan were. She doesn't come back to it until several chapters later, and even then she doesn't provide a lot of direct details—eventually the reader can suss everything out, but it takes longer than it really should for a book this short.
In the past year or two I've read several memoirs about people's trials and tribulations, and many of them have left me underwhelmed. When I post my middling-to-negative reviews on Goodreads, I usually get some insults from people who think not liking a memoir is tantamount to going to the author's house and criticizing her life choices to her face. I'm not going to sugarcoat it: I think this is a simpleminded attitude. An author and her book are not exactly the same. Writing a book requires making decisions about what to put in, what to leave out, what tone to take, how to organize everything, and on and on. All of that affects the reading experience, and if it isn't done well, I'm not going to appreciate the book. I think what happened to Kate Bowler is awful and I wish her the best, but I also wish I hadn't bothered to read this.
When I think back to memoirs I've really liked, such as The Liars' Club and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I'm reminded that it's just not enough to have an interesting life. A memoirist also has to be serious about writing a really good book. I don't see a lot of that happening in the current crop of memoirs, and in the future I'm going to be much more careful about which new ones I read. I'm sure Everything Happens for a Reason will help some people, but purely as a reading experience it didn't hit any kind of mark for me....more
This book has rightly become a sensation, and I'm not sure what I can add to the many laudatory reviews it has already received. As others have noted,This book has rightly become a sensation, and I'm not sure what I can add to the many laudatory reviews it has already received. As others have noted, for such a short book When Breath Becomes Air seems to have meant an impressive number of things to different readers. While I was moved by many things about this book, including the more personal messages Paul provided for his wife and daughter (as well as his wife's afterword), I particularly appreciated Paul's tireless striving for a meaningful life, and I was intrigued by his exploration of the distinction between the brain and the mind--a distinction I have often pondered myself, albeit without Paul's expertise. I can't think of a person I wouldn't recommend this book to. Paul's intellect, obvious humanity, and willingness to bare his soul add up to a memoir that's even more than the sum of its considerable parts.
I won this book via Shelf Awareness. There was no expectation of a review....more
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