by Angela Balcita ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2011
A heartwarming and inspiring memoir.
A Filipino woman with a deadly diagnosis finds love and support at every turn.
Raised in Queens, New York, Balcita’s family occupied a two-bedroom apartment. She spent a lot of time in the room she shared with her free-spirited brother, Joel, whom she idolized, and she was ever-fearful of the chronic stomachaches that plagued her youth. Her overprotective father, a doctor, obsessively coddled her, instilling fear about infections and disease. Unfortunately, his precautions proved to be appropriate, as minor medical problems (edema, shortness of breath, high blood pressure) interrupted her college years, and she was soon diagnosed with kidney failure. The progression of her condition forced doctors to order an immediate organ transplant, which precipitated her brother Joel to make a sacrificial donation. Providing love and support was college sweetheart Charlie, her lighthearted boyfriend who affectionately nicknamed her “Moonface” because of the bloating side effects of the anti-rejection drugs. After college graduation, Balcita relocated to San Francisco, a city “full of possibility” (and unsettling earthquakes). Charlie eventually joined her, and life became balanced until body chills signaled a kidney rejection, leading to grueling dialysis and the need for a second transplant. The author writes with earnest appreciation about the outpouring of kidney offerings she received from a fellow writer, Charlie and, surprisingly, Charlie’s protective mother. The painful aftermath of Charlie’s nephrectomy is coupled with Balcita’s daunting postoperative complications. The author gratefully reiterates how she has been blessed with the healing power of friends and family, who collectively bolstered her faith in love.
A heartwarming and inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-153731-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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