A tender, love-filled story of how one woman dealt with the loss of a young child.
A mother’s tale of love and loss.
In 1989, when she was 23, Murray left her Maine home and traveled to Thailand to work at a refugee camp, and she quickly fell in love with the people, culture, and natural surroundings. She eventually married a Thai man, Dtaw, and had three sons with him. As she chronicles, their family life was simple and peaceful—until illness struck her middle son, Chan, when he was 5. He was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, and the family moved to Seattle (“a halfway spot between Dtaw’s home in Thailand and mine in Maine”) for months of treatment before returning to Thailand. With vivid, immediate prose, the author successfully conveys the dismay, pain, sorrow, love, and joy the family experienced during Chan’s battle with his disease. Murray intertwines lush descriptions of the Thai landscape and culture with that of her more frenetic Western background as well as her views on medicine, which show the ambiguity she felt as she tried to do what was best for Chan. As the author came to the horrible realization that there was no chance of Chan recovering, she slowly eased into the mindset of making each moment with him count. Murray’s lucid meditations and living-in-the-moment attitude—e.g., providing simple pleasures like a favorite food to a sick child—serve as useful reminders to all of us that life is precious and fleeting and must be enjoyed to the fullest. It’s a simple message but an important one. As much a eulogy to Chan as a testament to the joy of life, the book is a heartwarming tale of dealing with life-altering loss. “I get mired in my own travails less now than I did before,” writes Murray in closing. “I don’t squint down into the blackness of my own mind so much anymore. Now I try to look up. I try to see the sky.”
A tender, love-filled story of how one woman dealt with the loss of a young child.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-666-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gracie Belle/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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