Somewhat slight but never saccharine, a graceful homage to an ordinary man.
High-school English teacher Stone chronicles a journey of discovery that began when she received a case of diaries bequeathed to her by a former student who died of AIDS.
Vincent was in one of Stone’s very first classes, and they exchanged Christmas cards for more than 20 years, but they were never particularly close. She doesn’t remember that much about him, other than his response as a 15-year-old to “The Gift of the Magi” and a single visit when he was 16. When his box of journals appears on Stone's doorstep, it takes her a moment even to understand that she's looking at a record of Vincent's final years. Puzzled but moved, Stone then spends three years becoming ever more absorbed by the artifacts, filled with ephemera from the life of a gay man enjoying San Francisco and traveling around the world. Her mood is one of grim anticipation; though his entries start out jauntily enough, he is soon engulfed by the horror of the mysterious plague that races through his community. Vincent discovers his first Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions, pays hospital visits to friends who will never recover, and makes squares for the AIDS quilt in memory of those who have been claimed by the disease. Reading about his inexorable decline, Stone finds parallels in her own life, including her inability to connect with the memory of loved ones who have died and the crisis provoked by her mother's mental deterioration. Vincent becomes more and more intensely real to her, and as she sees him handle the pain of watching his friends cut down one after another, Stone garners insight into how to treat her mother with dignity while making the best possible arrangements for medical care.
Somewhat slight but never saccharine, a graceful homage to an ordinary man.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-315-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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