These assignments invite readers to consider the essential question of Bowe’s course—and Hayasaki’s book: How can we learn...
In the genre of uplifting books about inspiring people, former Los Angeles Times reporter Hayasaki (Literary Journalism/Univ. of California, Irvine) offers a portrait of Norma Bowe, a psychiatric nurse and teacher at Kean University, whose “Death in Perspective” class has changed the lives of some of her most vulnerable students.
The author, who has faced death and loss in her own life, uses “immersion” and “participatory” journalism, following Bowe for four years, enrolling in the class and conducting extensive interviews. In addition, she read books and articles about death, dying and mental health, especially works by Erik Erikson, whom Bowe champions. Hayasaki structures her narrative by focusing on several students whose lives were in dire crisis when they met Bowe. One’s mother was a drug addict; another, whose father murdered his mother, cared for his schizophrenic younger brother; another struggled to wrest himself from a gang. Although reluctant to talk about herself, Bowe, too, revealed a dark past: She was an unwanted child, repeatedly battered by her cruel, narcissistic parents. Her grandmother raised her for part of her childhood. Indeed, besides Bowe, whom Hayasaki portrays as selfless and tireless, the heroines of this book are the many grandmothers who raised children their own offspring could not, or would not, care for. Bowe seems to have “radar hardwired inside her” that alerts her to people in need. Cheerful even while traipsing through a cemetery or visiting a halfway house, she emitted “an air of invincibility” and “a feeling so magnetic” that students flocked to her. At the end of every chapter, Hayasaki includes an assignment from Bowe’s syllabus—e.g., write your own eulogy, pretend you are a ghost and record your observations, write a goodbye letter to someone or something lost.
These assignments invite readers to consider the essential question of Bowe’s course—and Hayasaki’s book: How can we learn to celebrate life?Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4285-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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