A harrowing, intimately candid survivor’s journey through the minefields of cancer treatment.
A vibrant mental health expert’s bout with brain cancer and the revolutionary treatments that saved her life.
In 2015, Lipska, a veteran neuroscientist and triathlete who studies brains at the National Institute of Mental Health, found herself in a panic while out jogging in her suburban Virginia neighborhood. Without warning, she suddenly didn’t recognize her surroundings and became severely disoriented. Her confusion dissipated, and then she received a devastating diagnosis of metastatic melanoma in her brain. The resulting grueling two-month ordeal battling debilitating mental problems forms the core of this intensive memoir. The author briefly sketches the details of her history as a young, ambitious research scientist in Poland who eventually moved her family to America to pursue the study of brain illnesses and schizophrenia. In 2009, she underwent a mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis. In frank, unfettered prose, Lipska clearly demonstrates her courage, resilience, and pure dread in the face of disease and adversity. Of the three tumors found in her brain, one particularly “nasty raisin,” vexingly located in the folds of her visual cortex,” was bleeding. Though excised immediately, the author’s mental acuity deteriorated. Through urgent and vigorous passages, the author chronicles a valiant fight for her life, with radiation treatments and an immunotherapy trial, which caused a whole new subset of medical maladies. Toward the end of the treatment plan, her behavior went haywire, and she suffered cognitive impairment, rage, paranoia, and bafflement, all of which crowded out any semblance of rationality. Eventually, however, the treatments worked, and Lipska experienced a miraculous (and statistically rare) “second chance at sanity.” Throughout it all, the sheer irony of her ordeal never escaped her: “I am living through some of the processes of a disease that I’ve spent my life studying and trying to cure.”
A harrowing, intimately candid survivor’s journey through the minefields of cancer treatment.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-78730-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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