Perhaps the greatest achievement with this book, which brings to light one of the great medical tragedies of the 20th...
A clinical psychologist’s memoir about how she uncovered the truth behind the family secret that surrounded her disability.
Cronin was just 3 years old when she realized that while her siblings had “two legs and a bunch of toes,” her own body ended at the knees. When she asked why, her Catholic mother would say that it was because God had chosen her “to carry the cross.” Yet none of the other members of her family ever treated her as though she were different. That all changed when she entered school. She wore prosthetic legs but discovered that she would have to fight to win other people’s acceptance. Despite her physical challenges and the fact that her mother would be diagnosed with mental illness, Cronin still managed to have a relatively normal adolescence, which included parties, boyfriends and a healthy dose of sexual experimentation. It wasn’t until college, though, that Cronin became painfully aware that she wasn’t just, as one therapist suggested, a “mermaid” making her way in a two-legged world: She was disabled. Anger drove her to alcohol and to the destruction of meaningful personal relationships. At the same time, it also fueled her break with traditional Catholic expectations that she dedicate her life solely to motherhood and pushed her to demand answers about why she had been born legless. Investigation into her parents’ pasts finally confirmed what she had long suspected: that it was her mother’s use of thalidomide during pregnancy that had caused her deformities. Cronin’s confrontation with family secrets eventually allowed her to enjoy a successful career and marriage.
Perhaps the greatest achievement with this book, which brings to light one of the great medical tragedies of the 20th century, is that she is able to tell her story with a winning combination of candor, grace and humor.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08901-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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