Not especially literary, and the occasional stabs at humor fall flat. But compelling nonetheless.
Adjusting to life in a wheelchair.
At age 51, TV writer Rucker was struck with a rare neurological and immune disorder called transverse myelitis, which transformed him in the space of an afternoon from a healthy, active man into a paraplegic. The paralysis predictably reordered his priorities, and he believes he’s gotten a premature peak at the fate that awaits other aging boomers, who sooner or later will have to come to grips with a body that fails. Rucker frankly discusses his inability to control his bladder or bowel movements, stating that he never really knew what shame felt like until his first major scatological “accident.” The onset of TM also posed a financial challenge; outfitting a house for a wheelchair is costly, and the author could not devote as much time to work as he had previously. These worries frayed the Ruckers’ marriage, which had been strained well before the onset of TM, but they eventually found their way out of the thicket. Sex, meanwhile, “wasn’t all that big an issue,” he avers. The author declines to provide details about the couple’s “renewed passion,” except to note that it doesn’t rely on any of the less-than-satisfying erectile dysfunction meds that would have “engorged” his penis without providing any sensation: “My engorged friend would function more or less like an inanimate marital device that happened to be attached to my body.” As that passage suggests, there is no sentimentality on offer here. Paralysis isn’t a blessing in disguise, Rucker writes: “It’s not a blessing and there is no disguise.” Yet for all the horrible losses, there were some gains.
Not especially literary, and the occasional stabs at humor fall flat. But compelling nonetheless.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-082528-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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