An uneven but often engaging memoir that provides a much-needed window into how serious genetic conditions affect families.
In her debut, Rough explores her family's history with a rare genetic condition and how it has affected her life.
The symptoms of hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED) include the inability to sweat or produce tears, and other physical traits such as sparse hair, few and strangely shaped teeth and dry, nearly hairless skin. In the X-linked form of the condition, the gene is carried by females and manifests in males. The author's grandfather and brother suffered from the condition. Rough's mother is a carrier, and, as she discovered, so is Rough herself. A large part of this highly personal memoir deals with the author's quest to find out more about her HED-affected grandfather, Earl. He underwent a lifetime of breathing problems and constant infections, aggravated by mucous-membrane problems, and likely a suppressed immune system. He also developed a severe drug addiction brought on by the pain of his illnesses. At one point, he was given shock treatments in a psychiatric hospital; later, his wife divorced him. He eventually died at age 49, broke and alone. The author ably shows how HED devastated Earl's and his family's lives, but the story's effectiveness is compromised by some of Rough's stylistic choices—in particular, the narration of much of the story from Earl's first-person point of view. The author also writes that she re-created conversations and details using “disciplined imagination,” an odd designation. Nonetheless, Rough a fine writer with a talent for portraying subtle family dynamics. When she writes as herself, she is often quite moving—particularly when she deals with the possibility of passing HED to her unborn child and her pain as she receives the fateful genetic-test results.
An uneven but often engaging memoir that provides a much-needed window into how serious genetic conditions affect families.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-578-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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