A passionate hymn to the power of the American Dream.
Renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Quiñones-Hinojosa’s life story is as unlikely as it is inspiring.
Born into a Mexican family perpetually teetering on the edge of poverty, the author’s origins were anything but auspicious. Intelligence, imagination and a grandfather who believed that “hard work, honesty, and a good heart”—along with a healthy dose of charm and charisma—allowed Quiñones-Hinojosa to see beyond the difficult realities that defined his life. Economic circumstances forced his family to become migrant farmworkers for one summer in California; but for the author, going north “had a feeling of destiny” about it. Risking “injury, incarceration and even death,” he eventually returned to the U.S. on his own by jumping the border fence between Mexicali and Calexico. To survive, Quiñones-Hinojosa held a variety of menial jobs from tomato picker to fish-lard scraper to stockyard welder. Education saved him and illuminated his path: After earning his associate’s degree, he won a scholarship to UC-Berkeley, where he decided on a career in medicine. A fellowship to Harvard Medical School allowed him to pursue his dream and define himself still further as a brain surgeon and researcher. “From my earliest childhood, I had used my hands for everything from pumping gas to fixing car engines,” he writes. “[N]ow I could use [them]…to help patients heal.” The personal sacrifices that the author has been forced to make along the way prevents this story of professional success from reading like a fairy tale.
A passionate hymn to the power of the American Dream.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-520-27118-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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