A devout couple share their conviction that the husband's recovery from a deadly infection—one that recently gained considerable media notoriety—was a miraculous event brought about through the power of prayer. In December 1994 David Cowles, a 40-year-old professor of English at Brigham Young University, contracted streptococcus A, probably through a small cut on his finger, while on a family vacation in California. As happens very rarely, the bacteria turned aggressive, causing necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-destroying disease that can spread rapidly and cause death. Husband and wife take turns telling the story of his devastating illness and slow recovery, with David describing the trauma of the disease and revealing some of his spiritual experiences, including a powerful vision of life after death. Delys, on the other hand, focuses on practical matters, such as concurrent family troubles, financial worries, and learning to manage media attention, which was at times intensive. As the bacteria spread through his body, David was given a five to ten percent chance of survival by his doctors, who performed surgery on him six times during his first week in the hospital. To the Cowleses, David's beating of these odds was clearly due to ``the religious healing energy of many people from many religions praying for us.'' Skeptics might attribute David's survival to excellent medical and nursing care, powerful antibiotics, ready access to a hyperbaric chamber, proper surgical attention, and some very good luck. But it is not necessary to share the couple's belief in the special efficacy of multiple prayers to be heartened by their story of how friends, colleagues, family, church, and community rallied around them in their time of greatest need and to be moved by this plain telling of one man's brush with death. File this TV-movie-of-the-week saga under Inspiration. (First printing of 30,000; $50,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87905-809-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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