Although sometimes maddening to read, Lemon’s collision of ideas and images adds up to a celebration of a life unbowed by...
Fevered prose and wild digressions mark a poet’s candid memoir of pain and illness.
In 1999, when he was 21, Lemon (English/Texas Christian Univ.; The Wish Book: Poems, 2014, etc.) underwent surgery because of a bleeding vascular malformation in his brain stem, a procedure that caused severe debilities. “Medical clinics and hospitals have become a second home,” he writes, as he seeks diagnosis and treatment for a host of problems: painful swallowing, facial numbness, tremors, leg and back cramps, paresthesia, chronic constipation, ulcerated mouth sores, double vision, panic attacks, depression, insomnia, and exhaustion. “Always,” he writes, “it seems that I’m waiting for the results of a procedure that will tell me how close I am to death.” Added to this list is psychological trauma from having been sexually abused, when was 3, by a cousin who threatened to kill his family if he told anyone. At the time, Lemon writes, he wasn’t sure what was happening or whether it was “really bad. Maybe I deserve it,” he thought. “Maybe a part of me likes it.” Yet since then, he has been burdened by the effects of his cousin’s repeated cruelty. He learns that such trauma cuts the victim off from experiencing sensations and emotions that could be overwhelming, and he struggles, he writes, “to recalibrate my ‘felt sense.’ ” Lemon’s kaleidoscopic, occasionally scattershot chapters offer a collage of dreams, hallucinations, childhood memories, anecdotes about his wife and young son, references to literature, art, and popular culture, and, of course, the state of his body and mind. “Like So Many Nightmares,” for example, begins with his reading Rilke at daybreak and then segues into Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, Freud, Jung, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and anti-war protests in Minneapolis in 2003. “Knowledge is everywhere in the coming daylight,” he reflects, as his mind swerves and swirls through “an emporium of collisions and adoration” that illuminates for him the miracle of survival.
Although sometimes maddening to read, Lemon’s collision of ideas and images adds up to a celebration of a life unbowed by suffering.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57131-336-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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