Unflinching and inspirational, a parent’s powerful tale of finding love and understanding beyond the senses.
A mother depicts her family’s epic battle against nearly insurmountable genetic odds.
First published to wide acclaim in France, Hunter translates the intrepid tale of Julliand, a Parisian journalist and mother, whose own DNA cruelly forced upon her this memoir’s gripping subject. Already parents to a healthy 4-year-old son, Gaspard, in 2006, Julliand and her husband, Loïc, wondered why the big toes of their toddler, Thaïs, were turning outward, giving her a slightly awkward gait. Suspecting an orthopedic cause, nothing could have prepared the couple for the devastating diagnosis: metachromatic leukodystrophy, an incurable degenerative neural disorder that would, in short order, rob Thaïs of every faculty before truncating her young life. The Julliands learned the diagnosis on Thaïs’ second birthday and faced the grim prospect that she was not expected to reach the age of 3. As if this weren’t terrifying enough, at the time of the diagnosis, the author was five months pregnant and presented with the prospect that their unborn child had a 25 percent chance of having MLD as well. Six days after Azylis was born, while Thaïs was becoming bedridden and about to go mute, the Julliands learned that Azylis, too, had MLD. While lamenting that “genetics don’t let the laws of mathematics get in the way” but “take their toll as they see fit,” the Julliands drew even more deeply from their reserves of courage and agreed to a stem cell transplant, the one chance Azylis had to avoid the full brunt of Thaïs’ harsh fate. Though the author’s account charts suffering of mythic proportions, the lessons gleaned from her daughters prove incredibly wise.
Unflinching and inspirational, a parent’s powerful tale of finding love and understanding beyond the senses.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1611458244
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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