A candid memoir that reminds readers of the role attitude plays in success.
An inspiring tale of one man’s triumph over his challenges.
Page is a “blind man who refused to accept a passive role” in his life, a theme of resilience that runs through this compelling memoir. Page details not only his own challenges as a man born without sight, but also the surrounding adversities that his family members fought and overcame, setting a backdrop of expectation for him to do the same. Page’s particular form of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa, runs throughout his family, affecting his mother and cousins, but it afflicts him most severely as he has never known what it is to see. However, Page grew up with the understanding that the world was his to conquer despite whatever limitations he might have. Born on a farm in Missouri, every member of the family was expected to pitch in. From an early age, Page was expected to draw water from the well and carry it to the chickens, something he had to do several times a day. As he grew older, Page was involved in repair work and tree cutting, activities that most people would not ask of a blind child. Page’s sense of being just like everyone else was reinforced when representatives from the Missouri School for the Blind recruited Page for their school and his parents refused, reinforcing the viewpoint that Page was entitled to the same life as everyone else. This attitude continued to shape Page as he became an adult, going on to earn a doctorate and serving on the legislature of his town, advocating for the disabled. Throughout Page’s life, it is he who must remind everyone around him of his capability—something he never forgets and continues to prove with every milestone he achieves. Richly woven with anecdotes and honesty, Page’s story is humbling as he achieves more in his life than many who have the ability to see. Because of Page’s determination, no obstacle is big enough to stop him from succeeding, and his story is an important one to read.
A candid memoir that reminds readers of the role attitude plays in success.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1458214195
Page Count: 198
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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