A fall on the ice sends hemophiliac Andrews (Creative Writing/Purdue Univ.) to the hospital with a fractured ankle and a serious ``bleed.'' In the tradition of A Whole New Life by Reynolds Price, this journal of recuperation and memory alternates between the sweetly sad and the pungently funny. Poet Andrews echoes Alice James's remark ``How well one has to be, to be ill!'' ``Negotiating hemophilia'' meant, for him, facing it by daring it. To the dismay of his parents and a series of hematologists, he raced motorcycles, competed in skateboard events, and played in a punk-rock band. With his brother, John, on dialysis for kidney disease, he ``was the healthy child in the house.'' While John's death in 1980 haunts this memoir, Andrews's mother provides a counterpoint when she brings to the hospital his scrapbook from 1972, when Andrews, at age 11, made The Guinness Book of World Records by handclapping nonstop for 14´ hours. He intersperses headlines, correspondence, and excerpts from journal entries on that seemingly frivolous episode with moving recollections of his brotherly love, guilt, and ambivalence. Looming large over this memoir is every hemophiliac's nightmare: ``90 percent of hemophiliacs who had repeated infusions between 1978 and early 1985 carry HIV.'' The alternative to infusions is to allow a bleed to run its course ``and risk permanent crippling or even death.'' While things have improved with high-tech blood- clotting agents, Andrews notes that because hemophilia is still rare in the US—fewer than 20,000 diagnosed cases—most emergency- room doctors are simply unaware of the procedures for administering the synthetic agents. Andrews carries in his wallet a detailed letter of instructions from his hematologist. In this memoir, an excerpt of which appeared in Harper's, Andrews manages a nice balance of clinical detail and painful memory with wry humor.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-04244-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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