Sustaining an appropriate sympathy for this character is, sadly, not easy.
Cancer chronicle from a young Glamour editor that manages to be loutish and unlovely.
The unspeakable happened to Zammett, an attractive 23-year-old with a fashionable magazine job in New York City, a strong Irish family on Long Island and a oving boyfriend. After a routine medical checkup, she was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). This mysterious cancer is neither hereditary nor caused by environmental factors; Zammett’s oncologist likened contracting CML to being hit by lightning. The only known cure, her doctor explained, was a bone marrow transplant that required a genetically matched donor, had a 15 percent mortality rate and rendered survivors infertile. On the other hand, there was the miraculous, newly FDA-approved experimental drug Gleevec, which killed the cancer cells and left the others intact, though it did not cure the disease. The author and her parents embarked for the Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, where the drug trial took place. They were accompanied by a photo crew, because Zammett was writing a cancer diary for her magazine. “A Glamour staffer shares her battle to live,” regrettably, suggests this book’s overall level of insight and profundity. Certainly we’re relieved to read that within a year Zammett’s cancer was in deep remission. But despite the narrative’s inherent drama and suspense, it’s hard to get around the trashy colloquialisms of this University of Tennessee party girl. Each paragraph, it seems, has its own equivalent of the egregiously lazy (“I had pretty much learned to suck up the suckiness of the shots”), while vulgarisms from “fuck,” to “butt crack” abound. Of the many grossly superficial statements made in her affluent, competitive family, perhaps the most offensive is: “With cancer treatment . . . it’s all about who you know.” It’s no surprise that when her sister is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, they invoke the “healing power of shopping” and splurge on $300 Chanel sunglasses.
Sustaining an appropriate sympathy for this character is, sadly, not easy.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-643-8
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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