De Montalembert deftly shows how his other senses came to the fore after he lost his sight, but his spiritual awakening...
An impressionistic memoir by an artist whose lack of sight hasn’t diminished his lust for life.
In 1978, painter and filmmaker de Montalembert was attacked in his Manhattan home by a pair of burglars, one of whom threw paint thinner in his eyes and blinded him permanently. He recalled the assault and his recovery in Eclipse (1985), which became a bestseller in his native France. Invisible tells much the same story, but this slim book is styled more like a prose poem than a formal autobiography. Brief chapters alternate between the present and past tense, capturing both the author’s feelings of loss and fear in the days after the attack as well as his growing confidence in the years that followed. A lifelong world traveler, he slowly learned not just to navigate New York City streets but to catch planes to Indonesia, Greenland, India and other far-flung places, where he sought and occasionally found spiritual peace. De Montalembert is more hard-headed and down-to-earth than such earnest seeking might suggest. He bluntly states that “loss of sight is a mechanical accident, not a state of grace or an event fraught with spiritual consequences,” and he displays admirable candor and biting wit in discussing his clumsy first efforts to get around as a blind man, not to mention the romances that helped him during his recovery. However, specific events on his journey, including a trip to a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas, cry out for a fuller treatment, and the closing chapters drift into airy platitudes about the pleasures of art and the need to resist self-pity. The book is not a feel-good story, but that doesn’t stop the author from lapsing into clichés about hope and the future.
De Montalembert deftly shows how his other senses came to the fore after he lost his sight, but his spiritual awakening feels unconvincing.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9366-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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