More a let-it-all-hang-out gusher of prose than a cancer memoir.
You-are-there account of the author’s diagnosis, surgery and much more.
After her annual mammogram, Baker’s radiologist recommended a biopsy, which confirmed that she had intermediate-grade cancer. Readers will sympathize and share her pre-op fears and agonize with her during the wait for the post-op pathology phone call (taken by her husband, a radiologist). The news was good: Her cancer had been removed in situ, wasn’t invasive and other suspicious sites tested negative. Regular follow-up and watchful waiting were necessary; she didn’t require chemotherapy or radiation treatment, but Tamoxifen could lower her risk for recurrence by half. Baker opted for the drug (which has its own risks) and also went to the Mayo Clinic for further diagnosis and treatment. Most of the text, however, is devoted to the roots of her soul-searching, guilt-ridden persona. We learn that the Jewish author is a would-be novelist married to a Dartmouth-educated Protestant preppy, living comfortably in Madison, Wis., with two daughters and a son. We hear about her parents’ divorce, her mother’s breakdown, her brother’s suicide, her hostile stepmother. Baker dwells on past loves and current sex, marital ups and downs, her girlfriends and any number of day-to-day glad or sad events, including others’ cancer deaths. Some of this is funny, as when the author acknowledges her obsession with her breasts. But much of it is sad, particularly Baker’s voicing of the classic self-blaming cancer questions: What did I do wrong? Why me? Readers will weary of her zealous conviction that cancer can be staved off by leading the perfect life: keeping up with yoga, praying, marathon running, going “green,” eating organic—even making one’s own cosmetics. Her follow-up mammogram was negative, but that doesn’t make this self-indulgent narrative particularly useful to those recently diagnosed with cancer seeking wisdom and guidance.
More a let-it-all-hang-out gusher of prose than a cancer memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1162-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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