A testament to the strength and goodness within the human spirit.
Born with hemophilia, Massie’s childhood combined bouts of intense pain and disappointment with unabashed joy and lavish family affection. In this moving memoir, the author (Loosing the Bonds, 1997) recounts how this doubled-edged environment laid the foundation for a life filled with compassion and activism.
Frequently bedridden and shut out of normal adolescent activities, the author became a reader and thinker. “As I observed others, I also inched away from my self-centered view,” he writes. “I realized that many, if not most, other people faced their own struggles.” Massie continually questioned perceived injustices or institutional unfairness. Whether these unjust conditions existed in the form of racism, cultural and class divides in college, a haphazard and unjust system of free-market health insurance or belligerent corporate attitudes, Massie sought change for those affected. His educational and professional credentials are impressive. He attended Yale Divinity School, Harvard Business School, completed “a valuable stint at the Kennedy School of Government,” taught at Harvard Divinity School and ran for political office in Massachusetts. No matter which issue Massie faced, his goal remained the same: “I want everyone to thrive.” Massie faced a severe health challenge in the form of Hepatitis C, which debilitated him for years until he received a liver transplant, and years earlier, he had contracted HIV during a blood transfusion, though the disease never developed into AIDS. Massie offered himself to Massachusetts General Hospital as a research subject, resulting in a seismic shift in how the medical field looked at HIV. Without sentimentality or a partisan point of view, Massie offers a refreshing alternative from the divisive discourse rampant within much of today’s culture. “Let us choose a new way of talking to each other that honors each other’s dignity even as we disagree, perhaps profoundly, with each other’s views,” he writes in the epilogue.
A testament to the strength and goodness within the human spirit.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53575-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
