Brownstein’s warmth and candor will keep readers immersed in this tale of survival in a time of chronic illness.
PEN/Hemingway Award winner Brownstein (English/St. John’s Univ.; The Man From Beyond, 2005, etc.) turns to nonfiction to tell “the history of heart surgery through the story of my heart.”
When the author was born, in 1966, with a heart condition known as tetralogy of Fallot, making him an oxygen-starved “blue baby,” heart surgery was something new, and heart defects were a leading cause of death. Today, more than 2 million Americans, most in middle and old age, survive with congenitally defective hearts. Like Brownstein, they have benefited from great medical advances but have had to cope with difficult arrhythmias, open-heart surgeries, and other procedures. In this engaging account of his uncertain life “in a strange border country ruled by medicine,” he describes his birth to well-educated yet “frightened” parents who never talked about his health; his own inability to face his disease (“we deny weakness, defy it, and try to imagine it away”), and his “stunted, shuttered emotional life” as a traumatized young man. He relates this affecting personal story against the rise of our understanding of the human heart, from William Harvey’s 17th-century study of circulation to pioneering work in pediatric cardiology in the 1920s by woman doctors like the eccentric Maude Abbott to such modern surgeons as James Malm, who saved the author’s life. These historical pages, covering a dizzying array of surgeons and surgeries, are often overlong and will appeal mainly to readers who share Brownstein’s deep interest in his subject. Even so, with his keen eye and storytelling abilities, the author offers absorbing glimpses of an African American doctor who saved the life of a man stabbed in the heart at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and pioneer surgeon Walt Lillehei (1918-1999), who could drink seven martinis and then operate successfully the next morning on a small child with a hole in his heart.
Brownstein’s warmth and candor will keep readers immersed in this tale of survival in a time of chronic illness.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-949-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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