There is an ever expanding body of literature on coming to terms with mortality, and this entry ranks with the best.
An eloquent plea for a more humane approach to death and a moving meditation on the life that leads to that end.
Taylor (My Beautiful Enemy, 2014, etc.) was never a prolific novelist, but she makes every word count in this short memoir, published in her native Australia shortly before she died in the summer of 2016. “I’ve put off using my death as material for a long time, mainly because I couldn’t find the right tone,” she writes. “I’m not even sure I’ve found it now.” Despite that note of uncertainty, the author’s command of tone is masterful; her precise observance and unsentimental reflection take readers through the final stages of her fatal melanoma. It left her with so much gratitude at the richness of her life and significant regret over the loss of control a dying person experiences, given society’s tendency to want to prolong life as long as possible. There are three parts to the memoir. The first focuses on Taylor’s medical treatment, what led to it, and how she procured a drug from China that would allow her to commit suicide or to at least have that choice. The second encompasses the lives and deaths of her parents, whose marriage ended in tumult never resolved, and how the arrangements after those deaths intensified tension among the author and her siblings. There is a cautionary tale in this, a lesson she doesn’t want her own loving family to have to learn. The third section evokes the author’s childhood, what she remembers earliest and most vividly, and how life toward its end brings us full circle. “It’s often said that life is short,” she writes. “But life is also simultaneous, all of our experiences existing in time together, in the flesh.”
There is an ever expanding body of literature on coming to terms with mortality, and this entry ranks with the best.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941040-70-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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