A timely reading experience in these hectic times.
A searing account of how the author came to terms with her ex-husband’s unexpected death from a hidden drug addiction.
A few years after their divorce, New York Times contributor Zimmerman found her ex-husband, Peter, dead in his Del Mar, California, home. She knew he had been struggling for more than a year with “weight loss, chronic flu, sleepiness, ‘nodding’ (falling asleep suddenly), bruises, sores, [and] scratching.” He was also missing family get-togethers and outings with their two teenage children. A couple months before his death, Peter had told her that doctors had diagnosed him with an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto's disease. But his autopsy told a different story: Peter had died from “some combination of infection and heart failure” brought on by “injection drug abuse.” In her candid reflections on their marriage and the months leading up to his death, Zimmerman revisits her interactions with Peter to understand how and why the man who seemed to have everything—a partnership in a respected law firm, a beautiful home, and more money than he ever dreamed possible—would succumb to cocaine and opioid addiction. As she recounts, Peter had displayed many signs of drug abuse, including forgetfulness and increased hostility, and their son had even reported seeing him unpack an Amazon box full of “cotton balls and Band Aids and needles and alcohol pads.” Yet Zimmerman had missed them all because her upper-middle-class ex-husband did not fit the stereotype of an addict. Her subsequent research into white-collar drug abuse revealed that while genetics had likely played a role in Peter’s death; so had the brutal demands of the modern working world. Many of the young professionals she interviewed reported the need to turn to performance-enhancing psycho-stimulants like Adderall and LSD to manage those demands. Intimate and disturbing, the narrative chronicles the tragic impact of drug addiction on a family and lays bare truths about a success-at-all-costs capitalist society in which many social relationships are becoming fractured.
A timely reading experience in these hectic times.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-51100-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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