As much about life in a foreign clime as about motherhood.
Leary, wife of comedian Denis, recalls with rueful humor the weekend in London that turned into a five-month stay when their son was born prematurely.
Leary is one of those rare chroniclers of motherhood able to find the middle ground between sentimentality and science as she records both her joys as well as fears—she was sure the baby would stop breathing if she left his room. Disarmingly frank about her naïveté, she is also touchingly appreciative of the care she received at University College Hospital, which has the best neonatology unit in London. In March 1990, Leary’s husband was largely unknown in the US, but the BBC had asked him to appear on a TV show in London—all expenses paid. Ann, 26 weeks pregnant, also came along, but the next day, while out walking, her waters broke and she was rushed to hospital. There she was examined and put to bed, but her son Jack was born a week later. Ann had packed only for a weekend, the couple didn’t have much money, but the hospital staff, her family, and the new friends she made, all rallied around to help. As she recalls those difficult months, her fears that Jack might not survive, and the loneliness (Denis had to go back to work in the US), she admits to crying a great deal. But she was impressed with the medical care she received, the kindness of the people, and the continued stiff-upper-lip attitude, though she was shocked when her fellow patients, waiting to give birth, smoked and drank caffeine. Jack was eventually strong enough to leave the hospital, but they couldn’t fly home until his lungs were more mature, which meant finding an apartment—and taking care of Jack on her own. Now, 14 years later, she confesses to having a lingering scar from the experience, “a heart wrenching awareness of the prodigious wonder of Jack’s existence.”
As much about life in a foreign clime as about motherhood.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052723-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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