by Ann Neumann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 16, 2016
A valuable discussion of the complex issues involved in end-of-life care.
Journalist Neumann, a visiting scholar at the New York University Center for Religion and Media, takes an unflinching look at the reality of dying and end-of-life decisions.
“Knowing death makes facing it bearable,” writes the author in this chronicle of her six-year quest to come to terms with the death of her father. “There is no good death….It always hurts, both the dying and the left behind. But there is a good enough death.” Determined to follow her father's wish to die at home, the author and her sister tried unsuccessfully to care for him with support from hospice. He had decided after a 10-year bout with cancer to stop treatment, but the quiet death he envisaged was not to be. His pain proved intractable, and he was hospitalized. Two years later, still struggling with grief in the aftermath of her father's death, the author decided to become a volunteer for hospice. As a lay visitor her task was to offer companionship to the dying. The expectation is that hospice patients will not live longer than six months—though some do. The aim is to make their last days as painless as possible, not to prolong their lives. Neumann writes movingly of the experiences she shared with the people she visited: an elderly musician suffering from Parkinson's disease who wanted to hold his guitar once again despite his inability to play it, an 80-year-old doctor suffering from lung cancer, hoping to write an autobiography, and more. She also deals with deeper questions: what constitutes death for a person on life support who cannot give informed consent for its removal; does assisted suicide, which she supports, devalue human life and possibly curtail the rights of the disabled? Neumann does not sugarcoat the harsh reality of dying. “It always hurts both the dying and the left behind,” she writes.
A valuable discussion of the complex issues involved in end-of-life care.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8062-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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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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