Down for the count in his prime, now back on tour minus most of his small intestine and much of his body weight, a remarkably centered rock singer/songwriter chronicles his affliction with restraint and wry pluck in unbuttoned, conversational British. After months in the hospital, the ultimate diagnosis—of an extremely rare autoimmune syndrome that ravages blood vessels and leads to critical organ damage—matters less than Watt's experience of the ordeal and its strength-conferring lesson: ``I felt I had the scoop on life and death and everyone else was still running around after it.'' Pain was unremitting—from the disease, the tests, the surgeries, the treatments and inevitable side effects, the lines and the tubes and the needles that antagonized his sluggish veins. Pleasure was the luxury of a piss without the catheter, the tremendous contentment of a shower. Watt observed his acculturation to hospitalism: One day while vomiting radioactive orange juice after a scan, ``the invisible thread that had been tying me to home . . . had slackened. I became interested only in making things bearable for the next twenty minutes''; and elsewhere, with typical compression, ``weather is for other people.'' When there was room in the isolation of Watt's crucible, Tracey—the female half of his band and his household—faithfully anchored him. Watt emerged from the worst of his affliction with a more resonant singing voice, a new face in the mirror (which he regarded respectfully, ``impressed by the patience I saw there''), and a drastically foreshortened gut still prone to ``lock up'' every few weeks despite his adherence to a bizarre diet enhanced by steroids and immunosuppressants. In conclusion, ``It doesn't do to dwell on my bad luck . . . but it takes time to round it into the good times.'' Time plus the wisdom acquired in extremis and leavened by native aplomb. In both its graphic and reflective modes, this is resilient, just-so reporting. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8021-1612-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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