Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.
Black (I Knew You’d Be Lovely, 2011) details how she coped with the death of her father, then with a series of illnesses and other devastating personal losses.
The author’s father, a professor of math at MIT, was her best friend, especially during her teenage years. When she became “suspicious about the nature of existence,” he was always there to counter her fears with his no-nonsense “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” view of life. His decline and death not long after she graduated from Harvard upended her world. Already unsure what she would do with her life, Black “stopped paying [her] bills and doing laundry” as she battled an eating disorder. She sought work halfheartedly, first as a movie theater usher and then an ice cream server. Just as she began making peace with her father’s death, the author finally stumbled into a job as a proofreader. She bought a house in the country, found Jesus, and met the writer-boyfriend she christened “the Last of the Last Great Men.” Her happily settled life took an unexpected turn for the worse when she suddenly began to experience disturbing physical symptoms that no doctor or health test could explain. She then embarked on a medical odyssey that seemed to end with a diagnosis of mold illness. Even after she began treatment and got rid of her home and all her infected possessions, she continued to have symptoms that defied medical logic. Hysterical, Black took out her frustrations on her long-suffering boyfriend, who eventually left. Visits to the many subsequent specialists she saw in her quest for answers showed that her gut was not only a “Disneyland for pathogens,” but that she was suffering from iron overload. Though at times overly disjointed, the book still succeeds in offering a candid depiction of a woman’s struggle with her own vulnerabilities as she seeks to understand the “pile of terrifyingly beautiful rubble” left in the wake of all her struggles.
Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0059-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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