A graceful and touching gift of love and posthumous devotion from mother to daughter.
A mother’s loving tribute to a daughter struggling with terminal brain cancer who desired to die with dignity.
“No mother should bury her child,” writes Ziegler, a former teacher–turned–entrepreneur and public speaker, in this melancholic, poignant memoir. Though her 29-year-old daughter, Brittany, eventually succumbed to cancer, her death spotlighted the contentious issue of a terminally ill person’s right to end his or her own life. In 2014, after suffering debilitating headaches, the author’s daughter was diagnosed with a primary brain tumor and eventually given a murky prognosis. Ziegler’s smooth yet urgent prose is painstakingly detailed, offering minute particulars of Brittany’s childhood, her own story, and the cancer ordeal itself, treating readers to every nuance and heart-rending emotion flowing between mother and daughter during this emotionally harrowing twist of fate. “Hope rose in my chest and fluttered like a wounded bird,” Ziegler writes of her daughter surviving risky neurosurgery, but as the tumor continued to grow and the pain and seizures edged toward unbearable levels, Brittany kept to her initial resolve to explore assisted end-of-life options in Portland, Oregon, where a death with dignity law was on the books. This alternatingly heartbreaking and life-affirming book incrementally charts the life of Ziegler’s “magic carpet girl,” a formerly vibrant, athletic, daring, strikingly lovely woman whom she took on an Alaskan fjord boat trip as a closing bucket list item. Though her daughter’s final breaths were gloriously free-willed, Ziegler’s memoir is sad and often difficult to read at times; her daughter’s anger, uncertainty, denial, guilt, and grief become increasingly palpable as the narrative unfolds. Brittany self-administered a lethal medicinal combination in the fall of 2014 but not before pleading with legislators countrywide to fully support and adopt laws in their jurisdictions affording terminal patients the right to die on their own terms. In October of that year her moving YouTube video became a viral sensation.
A graceful and touching gift of love and posthumous devotion from mother to daughter.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2851-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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