An inspiring account of challenges faced and overcome, not only as a child but as a physician, mother, TV celebrity and the...
Moving debut memoir from obstetrician Masterson, who co-hosts the Emmy Award–winning TV show The Doctors.
With her 3-year-old daughter in tow and little money in her pocket, the author’s mother moved from Haynesville, La., to Seattle to pursue a job teaching English at the University of Washington. Masterson's mother and grandmother were university-educated teachers, but in 1970s Louisiana, the lives of black people were still heavily circumscribed. Despite scrimping and saving and advancement up the career ladder in a succession of government jobs, her mother could not afford her daughter's tuition without the help of a series of men who supplied the extras. “I knew her humanity, good, bad, and ugly,” the author writes. “She was my hero, but I knew her as a real person, perfect in her imperfection.” Driven to make her mother proud, Masterson thrived in elementary and secondary school, always at the top of her class, but when she left home to attend college, her life threatened to spiral out of control as she experimented with sex and alcohol. Pulling herself together, she decided to pursue a career in medicine. Her mother died of cancer when the author was 28, but her unconditional love and belief in her daughter continues to inspire her with unwavering confidence.
An inspiring account of challenges faced and overcome, not only as a child but as a physician, mother, TV celebrity and the guiding spirit behind the Maternal Fetal Care International foundation, which she founded.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59921-998-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skirt! Books/Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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