An intense, compelling account relates the romantic turmoil and physical pain experienced by a career woman diagnosed with...
An accountant and mother of two daughters writes candidly about her struggles with love, life, and suffering.
This debut memoir opens with a traumatic scene. While preparing dinner for herself one night, the author, a longtime lupus sufferer, tripped on her dog’s toy rope and knocked herself unconscious. Too weakened from her disease to stand up, she awakened and crawled toward a telephone to call for help, hoping that one of her daughters would come home soon and find her. Eventually, she fell into a kind of existential limbo, forced to consider why she was alone and urine-soaked on the floor. She lamented her failing relationship with Dave, a fellow accountant who came into constant conflict with her teenage daughters. And although she loved her daughters and wanted to preserve their independence as much as possible, she also resented them for not being more of a help in trying times. In subsequent chapters, Miguel revisits the emotional difficulty of watching her father gradually waste away from lupus, her problematic romance with Dave, her failed first marriage, and her increasingly contentious relationships with her daughters and extended family. Ultimately, the work concerns how suffering is as much a physical experience as an emotional one. The trials that Miguel and her circle faced reveal their flawed humanity. With a deft sense of pacing, the author vividly portrays each person in the narrative (“He was tan, twenty pounds lighter, and had an inner glow”). As a character, Miguel is fully formed: her weaknesses are as sharply drawn as her strengths (“The optimistic attitude I usually possessed had quickly and unknowingly been replaced with a victim mentality”). While the memoir becomes repetitious in its descriptions of Miguel’s numerous physical difficulties, the tight, clear prose remains compelling (“Since the cruise, it felt as though I were being placed back into a cell to finish out a life sentence”). Her surprising visit to a doctor later in the book (her lupus, it seems, may have been misdiagnosed) acts as a much-needed twist: what is the point of Miguel’s suffering? More important, how has her pain informed her relationships, and how will she change her behavior and attitude going forward?
An intense, compelling account relates the romantic turmoil and physical pain experienced by a career woman diagnosed with lupus.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3857-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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