A powerful mix of opinion, reporting and poignant recollection.
Newsweek columnist and McLaughlin Group pundit Clift combines a journalist’s account of the political circus surrounding Terri Schiavo’s death with the personal story of the death of her husband, Tom Brazaitis.
During the last two weeks of March 2005, both lay dying, the cancer-ridden Brazaitis quietly at home, the brain-damaged Schiavo in a Florida hospice center surrounded by fervid demonstrators and swarming media. Clift organizes their stories in the form of a diary, but each day’s entry is not limited to the events of that day. She provides ample background to the Schiavo case, giving a capsule history of the right to refuse medical treatment. She presents forthright portraits of Schiavo’s family members—her parents, who wanted her kept alive, and her husband, who wanted her to be allowed to die—who had been fighting for years over who should decide her fate. The author gives even more attention to the politicians and the pro-life and disability-rights figures who insisted that she be kept alive, and the judge who ruled repeatedly on her right to die. The Schiavo case, writes Clift, was the center of an “extraordinary clash…between the religious right aided and abetted by the full force of the federal government and the U.S. judiciary in the person of Judge Greer.” Drawing on transcripts from the McLaughlin Group, the author offers her own opinions on the politics of the situation, taking to task President George Bush, Governor Jab Bush and the Republicans in Congress. Meanwhile, her beloved husband was dying at home, his brain and bones invaded by cancer that had spread from his kidney, his care shared by Clift and hospice workers. Some readers may be offended by what could be viewed as an invasion of his privacy as the author includes unpleasant details of the physical and mental deterioration of a dying man. An epilogue contains roughly a dozen of Brazaitis’s graceful, rueful columns for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about his struggle with cancer from July 1999 to January 2004.
A powerful mix of opinion, reporting and poignant recollection.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00251-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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