Despite the often grim developments, energetic and upbeat reportage from the parental frontlines.
Unabashedly emotional, at times cloyingly cute memoir of how Chinese-American actor Wong and his partner became parents.
Composed mostly of e-mail the author sent and received, the narrative also includes baby Jackson’s imagined recollections (more mawkish than moving) of his birth and early days. Beginning with the premature arrival of Jackson and his short-lived twin, Boaz, Wong describes the first anxious hours and the roller-coaster days that followed as Boaz died and Jackson struggled to survive. In addition to a nail-biting account of the ordeal that ended when he was finally able to take Jackson home, the author also provides a tribute to his Chinese-American family in San Francisco and an account of an increasingly common but still controversial form of parenthood. In the late 1990s, Wong and long-time partner Richie, deciding that they wanted a child who would share their Chinese and Jewish heritages, began researching the options. Through a California agency they found a surrogate mother, Shauna, who already had two children. Richie’s sister, also already a mother, was prepared to donate eggs, while Wong would provide the sperm for in-vitro fertilization. The embryos were successfully implanted, but Shauna went into early labor, and the babies were born in May instead of August. Boaz, fatally anemic, died within hours. Jackson survived, but his lungs were immature and his colon blocked; he had to be flown by chartered plane to another hospital for more specialized care. As Wong relates his emotions, his worries, and the struggles to fulfill his professional obligations on both coasts, he also lovingly details his family’s support. The e-mails from sympathizers, friends, family, and colleagues, however personally affecting and helpful they were, pad the text rather than inform it.
Despite the often grim developments, energetic and upbeat reportage from the parental frontlines.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052953-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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