A fascinating exploration of personal identity from a writer whose body is, thankfully, “no longer at war.”
The stroke that hit Lee at age 33 left no visible signs of trauma, but it still changed her life forever.
A decade ago, the stealthy heart condition secretly lurking deep within the author since birth created a blood clot that shot through her body and lodged itself in her head, where “it killed a part of my brain.” Lee was standing in a hardware store parking lot at the time, thinking how odd it was that the shiny red snowblowers on display were suddenly and inexplicably “rotated ninety degrees.” What follows is the author’s emotionally explicit and intensely circumspect chronicle of how she dealt with what doctors later determined to be a thalamic stroke. “In those first few weeks,” writes Lee, “I was lost without knowing I was lost. I was searching with a deep belief that all would be well, not out of resilience or hope but out of ignorant bliss….My world was that [hospital] room, and in that room my struggles had little measured impact.” Unable to retain information, suffering from aphasia, and repeatedly rereading the same page of Slaughterhouse-Five over and over again, Lee eventually realized that she had to learn to confront older, deep-seated attitudes about her body and brain. She contemplates the years slavishly devoted to using her prized brain to subdue a seemingly undesirable body. That introspection, in turn, opened new doorways onto troubled relationships with her traumatized parents and increasingly distant husband. Forced to compensate for the dead part of her brain, Lee slowly achieved a new sense of gratitude for the body she had previously so reviled and mistreated. The journey of self-discovery is given an illuminating boost when the hole in her heart is finally repaired. With careful thought and new understanding, the author explores the enduring mind-body connection with herself at the nexus of it all.
A fascinating exploration of personal identity from a writer whose body is, thankfully, “no longer at war.”Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242215-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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