Well-researched, witty, honest and irreverent, Adam’s account proves as irresistible as his subject.
An engrossing first-person study of obsessive-compulsive disorder from within and without.
“An Ethiopian schoolgirl called Bira once ate a wall of her house,” writes acclaimed British Nature editor and writer Adam in the opening of his account of OCD. “She didn’t want to, but she found that to eat the wall was the only way to stop her thinking about it.” Bira, who had eaten over half a ton of mud bricks by the time she was 17 and finally sought medical attention, was found to have only “moderately-severe” OCD because she spent a mere two hours per day thinking about and then eating a wall of her house—the average OCD sufferer can spend six hours per day thinking odd thoughts and then four hours acting on them. What lends especial weight to Adam’s remarkable study of what psychiatrists consider the fourth most common mental disorder and the World Health Organization ranks as the 10th most disabling is Adam’s admission that he, too, suffers from OCD, having been plagued for over 20 years by an irrational fear of contracting AIDS. Far from being fastidiously punctual or a tad “anal” around the house, Adam demonstrates that OCD is a serious, crippling condition capable of rendering the daily life of the afflicted virtually unlivable. “OCD,” writes the author, “dissolves perspective. It magnifies small risks, warps probabilities and takes statistical chance as a prediction, not a sign of how unlikely things are.” Repeatedly transfixed by a bizarre thought, which turns into an obsession, the OCD sufferer cannot find relief until compulsively acting on that obsession. Adam delves deeply into OCD’s possible causes, its varieties—whether obsessed with contamination from dirt (Lady Macbeth) or disease (Howard Hughes), an irrational fear of harm or irrepressible need for symmetry (Samuel Johnson)—and treatments, breaking down this complex condition in easily accessible layman’s terms.
Well-researched, witty, honest and irreverent, Adam’s account proves as irresistible as his subject.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22395-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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