A sincere effort, but one that offers few new revelations for chronic diabetes sufferers.
Starks recounts her diabetes diagnosis and the steps she took to manage her disease in this debut memoir.
The author opens her story on a day in 2008 when she felt inexplicably weak while walking in a park; she sat on a bench and found that she “could literally not walk back to the car.” It turned out that she had a glucose reading in the 1100s—many times the healthy level. Thankful to be alive, she began a crash course in managing her diabetes. Starks got her diagnosis after years of poor nutrition and neglect, she admits, so developing better eating habits and following a healthy routine took a concerted effort. Over the course of the next few months, she created a new routine that included eating healthy, walking daily, and finding time to relax. Taking time to care for herself, she says, meant that she was better able to take care of others, including her teenage daughter. Throughout this book, she includes banal but necessary life lessons, entreating readers to take care of themselves, to keep moving forward, and to deal with stress early and often. There are moments of spiritual peace and comfort when Starks opts for grace and fortitude in the face of her diagnosis. She writes, for example, that she didn’t ask God for a cure or an explanation, but rather for support and the strength to fight it. The author’s diabetes-related ailments include poor eyesight, and she uses the anatomy of the eye as a metaphor for building strong character. She also says that her health crisis reflected her lack of values regarding health and wellness, and she posits that similar crises in values encompass other societal ills, including racism, sexism, and even terrorism. Insights like this occur rarely in this book, which often reads like a journal. However, the author’s colloquial tone and candid handling of medical jargon make aspects of disease management less intimidating, which may be useful for readers coping with a new diagnosis. For example, in plain English, she characterizes the cycle of insulin spikes and drops as a self-perpetuating process: “[I]f there is fat around your waist area, the sugar cannot get through into the cells, and so the body tries to produce more and more insulin....your body is working harder than it needs to.”
A sincere effort, but one that offers few new revelations for chronic diabetes sufferers.Pub Date: May 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1448941674
Page Count: 236
Publisher: PublishAmerica
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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