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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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