Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative.
First-book author Barber recalls the suicide of one boyhood friend, the disintegration of another, his own experiences working with the homeless, mentally handicapped and mentally ill—and wonders why he’s been able to emerge from the tangled wood and others have not.
Barber (Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health/Yale Univ. School of Medicine) mixes affecting autobiographical anecdotes, self-deprecating humor, summaries of psychiatric cases and speculations about the meaning of life. He begins with his most powerful segment, the 1983 suicide of his close friend Henry, an act no one witnessed but that Barber imagines with great poignancy. (Later, he employs, to diminishing effect, the same technique in imagining the suicide of that same friend’s mother, who years later killed herself in the same remote location and fashion as her son.) Barber relates many stories about his school and collegiate days (he dropped out of Harvard, then returned and graduated), including some harrowing times when he watched Henry systematically destroy every object in his room. He also tells about his long struggles with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and his initially liberating experiences with Prozac, along the way offering some details about his parents and about his courtship and marriage. He sort of backed into the mental health profession by taking a job in a home for the mentally retarded, which led to his eventually working long hours at Bellevue and helping at homeless shelters. His wife’s pregnancy, he says, transported him from the shelters to the Ivy League. In closing, Barber observes that he and his close friends—all bright, all successful in school—might have struggled because they’d had to create their own war to fight, unlike the WWII and Vietnam generations, who were challenged by history more directly and profoundly. Some of the segments—especially the long case narratives—seem more tangential than essential.
Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative.Pub Date: March 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-1298-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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