An unquestionably heroic narrative that never sounds preening or self-satisfied.
Poet Serotte turns to prose to recreate her childhood as a Sephardic Jew in post-WWII New York.
Her memoir is filled with the requisite ethnic eccentricities, from hovering aunts to mouth-watering exotic foods. What transforms this from a predictable child-of-immigrants-coming-of-age saga is the author’s struggle with polio. Her carefree girlhood came to an abrupt halt in September 1954, when she collapsed one evening next to her mother’s mah-jongg table. Rushed to a hospital, seven-year-old Brenda learned that she was better off than some: She hadn’t contracted bulbar polio, a fate that would have consigned her to an iron lung. The polio ward she called home for several months housed some bulbar patients, and staff and patients alike were always listening carefully for the click of their tongues, the only way they could communicate if something went wrong—if, for example, their iron lung stopped working. Serotte brilliantly recreates the sheer dread the very word “polio” evoked in those pre–Jonas Salk days. Her description of her family’s response to her illness is unflinching. Her father doted without coddling, but her mother was barely able to cope. An emotionally withdrawn woman to begin with, she could not stand the fact that her lovely daughter would forever be crippled; her grief and shame culminated in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. During her long hospital convalescence, Brenda was forced to find a surrogate mother in Mrs. Cook, whose daughter also had polio. Throughout her ordeal, Serotte was terrifically brave, determined not only to live, but to learn how to walk before her cousin’s wedding in December.
An unquestionably heroic narrative that never sounds preening or self-satisfied.Pub Date: March 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-4326-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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