Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.
The author, a life-threatening-illness support leader and wife of the late actor Patrick O’Neal, recalls a roller-coaster life that steadied into meaningful depth.
With a light hand, O’Neal makes it clear that her life could have taken her to a very different place than where she is now as an emotional-support figure at Friends In Deed, a crisis center for critically ill people that she founded. Before she met her husband she was already an actress and successful model, and he brought just that much more glamour to her days. They lived in a series of envy-inducing apartments, moved in the company of tony friends and had the wherewithal to act on their desires. O’Neal recounts plenty of tribulations as well—her husband’s drug and drinking problems, a son who appeared to be taking after his father, the deaths of friends and acquaintances, which began to steamroll as the AIDS epidemic made its way through her milieu of artists. The deaths tripped a switch. “I could not live with the idea that someone was ill, frightened, alone, and not try to do something about it,” she writes. Any do-gooder suspicions are neatly laid to rest by O’Neal’s frequent skirmishes with her motivations and her candor about her ill-preparedness for such passion. “I think crisis holds a real seduction for me, and certainly there is some magical thinking involved,” she writes. “There’s a primal place in me that thinks that if I do my very best to help other people in their crises, disaster will stay away from me and mine.” Eventually, many of the “me and mine” became the men and women who found themselves at Friends In Deed, a handful of whom are profiled here with respect and honor. O’Neal made her share of mistakes, and her spiritual quest to face death is rocky, but she doesn’t lose sight of those who benefit from her compassion.
Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58322-906-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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