This tale of life with sextuplets is so lively and good- humored it almost makes you wish they were yours. Becki and Keith Dilley are blessed with energy, determination, a sense of humor—and four boys and two girls who will be two years old in May. Aided by Stall, editor of the Indianapolis Monthly, they recount in alternating chapters their courtship, marriage, and attempt for more than five years to have a baby. Finally, a state-of-the-art fertility drug led to a multiple pregnancy. Doctors detected five fetuses; it wasn't until the babies were delivered by caesarean that the obstetrician discovered number six—at 2 pounds, 13 ounces, the largest and lustiest of the group. The infants spent nearly three months in the hospital's neonatal unit, gaining weight and maturing. Moving in with her parents, Becki scrambled to care for the babies while Keith worked long hours at a fast-food restaurant. Sleep was a dim memory, as was any other piece of normal existence. Ultimately, Becki went back to work—as an experienced nurse, she could make more money—while Keith stayed home as Mr. Mom times six and proved a natural, organizing feedings, naps, playtime, and household chores with a minimum of frustration for everyone. Thanks to income from carefully selected interviews and endorsements (they accepted an offer from an infant formula company but turned down the National Enquirer), they were able to buy a custom-designed house in an Indiana suburb with a childproof playroom. Watching the toddlers explore and test their new skills there, Keith describes it as ``our own entertainment center.'' A chapter of tips for future parents of sextuplets or any set of multiples closes with the advice, ``Always remember how lucky you are that you were chosen to be uncommon parents.'' Endearing without being saccharine. (b&w photos, some not seen)
Pub Date: June 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43706-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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