A loving tribute by turns harrowing and beautiful.
Novelist Hood’s brief, heartbreaking memoir chronicles the death of her five-year-old daughter and its soul-searing aftermath.
In 2002, Grace contracted a virulent form of strep throat. A broken arm in her ballet class, a fever that seemed to come out of nowhere, a call to the pediatrician and, writes Hood, “a day and a half after I carried her into the ER, Grace died.” The book opens with the author’s description of the interminable hours in the hospital, watching as Grace cycled from near-comatose to “better” to dead. Though she’s mined this material before in her fiction (The Knitting Circle, 2007, etc.), Hood’s terror and agony are once again fresh. Watching her daughter go into cardiac arrest, she writes, “I screamed, ‘Gracie! Gracie! Gracie!’ so loud and so often that my throat remained dry for days afterwards.” The rest of the book delineates the process of grieving undergone by Hood, her husband and their eight-year-old son Sam. Unable to write for a time, Hood took up knitting and thought back on her life before marriage and motherhood. She had been a young woman who effortlessly left places and people behind; then she fell in love with Manhattan, and “the one place I thought for certain I would never leave was New York City.” Her husband persuaded her to move to Rhode Island, but for years she felt it didn’t fit. The story of how she “slowly, slowly” began to find her place in this new world is as compelling as the ghastly account of Grace’s tragic end. Eventually, time started to do its healing work: Hood was again able to put words on paper, and in 2005 the family adopted a baby girl from China—born on the date Grace died.
A loving tribute by turns harrowing and beautiful.Pub Date: May 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06456-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
