At times self-indulgent but provocative.
A wrenching account of how the author gave birth to a stillborn baby and coped with the loss of her child.
Heineman (History and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies/Univ. of Iowa; Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse, 2011, etc.) was approaching her mid-40s when she and her partner decided to try for a baby. Conception happened relatively quickly, though, and the pregnancy was easy. Against medical advice to the contrary, she decided to have her baby at home with only a midwife in attendance. Heineman knew an out-of-hospital delivery was risky and that her advanced maternal age made her vulnerable to problems during pregnancy as well as childbirth. But she was also unwilling to have her baby in an impersonal hospital setting. Heineman remained optimistic even after her pregnancy stretched beyond 40 weeks: Her health was excellent, her baby was in good condition, and Deirdre, her midwife, had been practicing midwifery more than 20 years “with no bad outcomes.” Just as she was about to give birth, an unexpected placental abruption occurred, and the child, a boy she had nicknamed Thor, was born dead. Heineman found that little support existed to help grieving parents of stillborn children make sense of their losses. She also discovered the grim truth that, in a society afraid to acknowledge the reality of death, the proper place of corpses was not among loved ones but “away from the living.” With tenderness and lucidity, Heineman writes about the bonding rituals she and her partner developed around Thor’s body, which a sympathetic funeral director allowed them to keep before interment. These descriptions are disturbing yet refreshing for their honesty. However, some readers may find the author’s protracted post-mortem of both her decision to give birth at home and its consequences overdone and obsessive.
At times self-indulgent but provocative.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55861-844-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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