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
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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