Very readable survivor story, but, unlike Jamie Weisman’s As I Live and Breathe (p. 553), fails to give any real sense of...
Memoir of a physician whose world is turned upside down by the discovery that he has a rare and deadly form of leukemia.
Kurland, a pulmonary pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and a devoted long-distance runner, is a man accustomed to taking charge, making decisions, and driving himself hard. When he discovers in March 1987 that he has hairy cell leukemia, the control he feels he has over his life abruptly disappears. He is transformed from being the one who performs bone marrow biopsies to the receiver of this painful procedure, and later, he find himself no longer the one who conducts research but rather a research subject. Although working in a Sacramento hospital when he begins his journey into illness, Kurland goes to the Mayo Clinic, where his father is a doctor. There, his father’s connections make it possible for him to be seen in a hurry by the right specialists. First, his spleen is removed, and when he recovers from that, a mass in his chest is taken out. Kurland shares his anxieties and fears about what is happening to him physically, and he vividly shows what it is like to be processed through the efficient assembly line of the Mayo Clinic. By deftly translating medicalese into layman’s language, he makes his story accessible to all. For a while, his blood count remains high enough that no chemotherapy is needed, but eventually, he must enter a study combining an experimental drug, Pentostatin, with interferon. By June 1989, he’s in remission, and a year later, at memoir’s end, he is running in a 100-mile race.
Very readable survivor story, but, unlike Jamie Weisman’s As I Live and Breathe (p. 553), fails to give any real sense of how, or whether, this doctor’s perceptions of his profession were altered by his experience with illness.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-7171-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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