The dramatic, sad story of a young woman's prolonged death from cancer, as told by her devastated father. Novelist Hobbie's (The Day, 1993, etc.) history takes a novel's form, told in the third person from the point of view of the writer/father. Brett was the oldest of his three children, red-haired like him, ``a dazzling young woman . . . hastening to a world of possibilities'' when she moved from the East Coast to San Francisco at age 23 to begin life on her own. Shortly after she began her first job as a writer, a small lump appeared above Brett's collarbone. The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma. Medical experts squabbled over the prospects of a cure as Brett began four years of debilitating tests and therapy, in and out of hospitals, in and out of emergency rooms. Sieges of fever, coughing, and often agonizing pain were interspersed with long, hopeful periods of remission. During one of those periods, she acquired a lover, Beth. Within a month, symptoms returned. Brett kept a journal and wrote letters; when words could no longer serve her, she began to paint, trying to express both the intensity of her suffering and her persistent claim to a life outside her disease. For the last summer of her life, she and Beth returned to live near her family in Massachusetts, where Brett and those she loved tried to reconcile themselves to her death. This is always her father's story, reconstructed from the journal he kept through those long years. As eloquently and honestly as it is recounted, Brett's tragedy is filtered through his sometimes self-conscious sorrow. Too painful to be a comfort to other parents and lovers, this is—as it seems meant to be—a tribute to the richness and vitality of a young woman who fought to make every dying day count for life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-2520-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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