An encouraging, heartwarming story about the strength of the human spirit.
Uplifting memoir by a young man determined to regain a full life after suffering a devastating spinal injury at age 24.
Clark, whose dive into the shallow end of a pool left him paralyzed from the neck down, is today, at age 30, running a thriving business whose profits are helping other victims of spinal-cord injuries. His story of recovery is full of grit, perseverance, resourcefulness and a lot of support from a loving family. Years of physical therapy followed the accident, often with therapists who seemed to be urging him to accept his fate and to learn to live with his limitations. The author, who refused to give up hope, tried acupressure, chiropractic and hypnotherapy; he researched innovative treatments, even going to China for stem-cell surgery and signing up for aggressive, inventive clinical trials. Gradually, he recovered feeling in some parts of his body, and he continues to hope for further improvements. Because the injury to his spinal cord cost him the ability to sweat, his skin began to have serious problems. To alleviate them, he turned to his father, a doctor familiar with alternative medicine, and together they experimented with dozens of botanical extracts. One of them, jasmine absolute, became the principal ingredient of a helpful cream, whose use soon spread to his father’s patients and to others. From this he got the idea of starting a company and developing a line of skin-care products. Before his injury, Clark had worked at Harper’s Bazaar, and his contacts in the fashion world helped him promote his new company, Clark Botanicals. As a paraplegic, he had long been an admirer of Christopher Reeve, and a portion of the profits from his firm supports the work of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, an organization for which Clark serves as a national ambassador and fundraiser. The book contains vivid descriptions of what it feels like to be paralyzed and helpless and reveals the negative attitudes of some in health care toward patients with disabling injuries.
An encouraging, heartwarming story about the strength of the human spirit.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2343-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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