An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.
A father’s candid, heart-wrenching account of raising, loving and trying to connect with and gain insight into his severely disabled son.
A journalist for The Globe and Mail, Brown wrote a series of pieces about his son Walker for the newspaper in 2007. The book, a multiple-award winner in Canada when it was first published in 2009, is largely based on those pieces, which in turn had their beginnings in a journal the author had kept. Brown’s son Walker was born with cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder affecting only a few hundred children around the world. The author writes of the struggle to raise a self-destructive child who could not speak and suffered numerous physical deformities and medical problems, recounting in sometimes harsh detail the onerous daily routine of caring for the boy and the strains this put on his marriage. However, this is much more than a moving journal of life with a disabled child; it is about Brown’s quest to understand his son and his son’s condition. He seeks out and profiles other families with CFC children, interviews a genetic researcher who found mutations in three genes related to the disorder, looks for clues to CFC through an MRI of Walker’s brain and travels to France to visit L’Arche, a faith-based organization that operates communities for the developmentally disabled. Brown’s story of the frustrations of trying to do the best for his child and find a safe place for him in a world uncomfortable with people with disabilities reveals the failures of society to establish a coherent system to help the families of disabled children. After years of at-home care, the author found a satisfactory group home for Walker, now 13, where he appears to be thriving.
An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-67183-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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