In a companion to a TV documentary, the longtime NPR host and podcaster interviews terminally ill patients and others about end-of-life choices.
One in five Americans lives in a jurisdiction that allows terminally ill adults to request “medical aid in dying,” the term many experts prefer to “assisted suicide.” Rehm (On My Own, 2016, etc.) became a champion of the swiftly growing right-to-die movement after her first husband, ravaged by Parkinson’s disease, begged doctors in vain for help ending his life. In the gently probing interviews collected here, the author discusses the pros and cons with people who have seen the effects at close range: patients, relatives, physicians, clergy, hospice administrators, and others. An African Methodist Episcopal pastor explains why he opposed the death-with-dignity law in Washington, D.C., given its potential for use against blacks. Dan Diaz recalls the upheavals his wife, Brittany, faced when they moved to Oregon so she could end her life after a diagnosis of terminal cancer; amid the devastating news, she had to find a house to rent and get a new driver’s license and voter registration card to establish residency. Other interviews in the book, which features a foreword by John Grisham, focus on a variety of relevant questions: Who qualifies for medical aid in dying? What life-ending medicines do doctors prescribe? How long does it take to die after you ingest them? Several contributors give similar answers to the same question, which at times grows repetitious but suggests the variations around the country. For gravely ill patients, a vital point is that securing aid in dying involves paperwork, a waiting period, and finding two doctors willing to help. These safeguards can have heartbreaking results for anyone who puts off making a decision. The approval process takes an average of about one month, notes the president of the group Compassion & Choices, “and about half the people die before that.”
Thoughtful conversations with friends and foes of the death-with-dignity movement.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65475-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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