Unmarred by self-pity, an arresting story that women and men suffering from heart disease will find, well, heartening.
A commanding chronicle of a year in a woman’s recovery from an unexpected and near-fatal heart attack.
Not only was Deborah Heffernan relatively young, only 44, but she had never smoked, she ate her fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, she maintained a healthy weight, and her family had no history of heart disease. Moreover, she had a loving husband, good friends, and a successful career. But there she was in yoga class, pressure crushing her chest. “I’m having a heart attack,” she told her teacher. Within minutes, the EMS was there, transporting her to a hospital and bypass surgery, while her family and friends stood a death watch. Heffernan did not die, but her life and the lives of everyone around her changed as she slowly worked her way back to health, with a defibrillator implanted to monitor every beat of the half a heart she now lived with. Her recovery, from her first hesitant walk from hospital bed to bathroom to a vacation in the Alaskan bush a year later, is described in sections that mirror the change of seasons. It encompasses longer and longer walks in the Maine woods, yoga, massage, and psychotherapy for her and her husband. It also involves a long and sometimes painful exploration of why, given her remarkably healthy lifestyle. Long years of hidden stress, going back to her mother’s death 30 years before and culminating in a job that found her living out of suitcases was her answer. The damage will never be undone, and a heart transplant may be in her future. On the positive side, Heffernan’s medical crisis mended years of strained family relationships, and she has learned to find significance in even the most casual encounters. Her personal tale is interspersed with salient information about heart disease, including the fact that it is the number one cause of death among American women, more than all cancers combined.
Unmarred by self-pity, an arresting story that women and men suffering from heart disease will find, well, heartening.Pub Date: April 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2922-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
