A heartening and well-told family story.
A father pays tribute to his son, who inspired many with his optimism during 39 years of living with a severe disability.
Debut author and freelance agricultural writer Boone’s middle son, Peter (1975-2014), had spina bifida. He was born with a high, large, open wound on his back and was given a poor prognosis. Luckily, medical advances made Peter part of the first generation of spina bifida patients to reach adulthood. But his was no easy ride: he was soon wheelchair-bound and over the years endured 80-plus surgeries and multiple hospitalizations. A particularly disastrous 1987 operation left Peter reliant on oxygen and a ventilator and unable to eat or speak normally; for nearly nine years, he communicated chiefly by mouthing words. It’s impressive how conventional a life Peter led despite intense physical trials: from elementary school onward, he attended regular classes; he learned to drive a customized van and attended his prom; and after getting an associate’s degree, he worked as a tutor at his old high school. Boone skillfully cuts between Peter’s major achievements and the challenges of daily life with a disabled family member; in particular, he is careful not to neglect struggles his wife and other sons faced. While telling Peter’s story as a straightforward yet absorbing chronological narrative, the author occasionally pauses to thank those who supported his family: Peter’s doctors, their Quaker congregation, and Joni and Friends (a charity founded by quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada), whose camps Peter attended and then volunteered in. Peter’s obsessive love of sports, especially football and the Purdue teams, is a strong theme running throughout the moving book—“although he couldn’t be an athlete in body, he was a great one in spirit,” Boone writes. Crucially, Peter and his family never stopped seeing the lighter side of things, as in a vivid scene in which flooding forced them to deliver Peter home by tractor. It’s no wonder that his high school instituted the “Peter Boone Mental Attitude Award” in his honor or that 400 attended his memorial service when he succumbed to a coronary thrombosis.
A heartening and well-told family story.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7878-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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