An emotionally raw and uncompromising memoir.
A British journalist and nonfiction writer’s account of how he came to uneasy terms with the accidental death of his 14-year-old son.
When Harding (The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, 2016, etc.) lost his son, Kadian, on a cycling trip, the irony seemed too cruel. Twenty-five years before, he had met his wife and Kadian’s mother while doing a charity bike ride across the United States. A dedicated journalist “too busy to be a father…too irresponsible,” he had not wanted children; but when Kadian and, later, a younger daughter were born, he fell “totally in love.” Harding remembers the death and too-brief life of his son, a “Prince Charming” of a boy who loved lizards, bicycles, and Apple electronics. He also offers a stark portrait of his own anguish. Time—along with the contented life he knew—seemed to end the moment his son died. Trying to make sense of the tragedy, Harding moves between past and present, joy and sorrow, to create a sense of the traumatic inner fracturing he experienced. Guilt further compounded his grief. Not only did he feel anger at his inability to shepherd his daughter and wife through loss. He also wrestled with the overwhelming sense that, in his role as family protector, he was to blame for his son’s death. Bewildered and struggling to cope with PTSD, Harding searched for and found a word—kampu—used by a group of Australian Aborigines to describe the parent of a dead child. Sympathy from those around him as well as the work of memorializing Kadian helped gradually assuage the author’s pain. Yet Harding realized a new truth—that his purpose would be “forever questioned, in doubt”—had come to define his “imperfect” life as a kampu. Both eloquent and heart-rending, Harding’s book is not only a grieving father’s testament of love to his dead son. It is also a reminder of the fragility of life and human relationships.
An emotionally raw and uncompromising memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06509-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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