The attempt to balance personal trauma with wider cultural reference is a tricky challenge, but this will resonate with...
A mother’s uncertainty about her baby daughter’s medical care pervades this unsettling memoir.
Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, 2014) is both a novelist and an attorney, occupations that provide different perspectives on her plight as a concerned parent. A few weeks after birth, her daughter, Abby, inexplicably began showing symptoms of a seizure, perhaps a prelude to something worse. She then developed an alarming fever, which left almost as quickly and inexplicably as it arrived. To the various physicians who examined her, she was “a self-contained enigma, despite a hefty team of specialists offering varied hypotheses.” The author herself was surrounded by doctors—her father, her husband, and others—but she came to see how inexact a science medicine could be. For the creative writer, “this is quickly becoming a story that has nothing to do with grief or planning for grief, or treatment to combat an illness, but rather coping with the uncertainty of health in the dense fog of evolving medicine.” For an attorney experienced in cases of medical malpractice and whose father found his career threatened by an unfounded claim, Silver felt beleaguered by questions that implied guilt or blame—as if she did something to her daughter, dropped her or shook her, and either wouldn’t admit it or couldn’t remember it. Memory itself becomes a reflection of universal uncertainty, as does the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner, Waiting for Godot, and Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” Ultimately, the author attempts “to control my surroundings as best I can without losing semblance of self, without stopping life, without changing behavior to a point of invisibility. And I create a narrative that evolves daily.” Readers will share Silver’s unease with uncertainty.
The attempt to balance personal trauma with wider cultural reference is a tricky challenge, but this will resonate with anyone who has experienced diagnostic difficulties.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98144-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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