Entertaining, intelligent and compassionate essays that provoke reflection.
In these essays, a noted bioethicist takes a thoughtful, wry look at his personal life as a way to touch on larger issues.
Appel (Scouting for the Reaper, 2014, etc.) is one of life’s overachievers: a physician, attorney and professional bioethicist, he also writes fiction, essays, opinion pieces and plays; his 2012 novel The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize. This strong volume brings together 13 previously published essays, in which Appel delves into his family history, childhood and other personal experiences, generally as jumping-off points for insights related to his medical, legal and ethical concerns. In “Two Cats, Fat and Thin,” for example, Appel spins an anecdote about stolen toys into a consideration of wealth, privilege, loss and changed lives. Should his parents try to get back Appel’s toys, which may have been stolen by a motel maid for her own son?: “Did I really want to yank [them] from his deprived little hands? Yes, I did.” Here, as in other essays, the author is disarmingly willing to consider his own shortcomings and misprisions. Several essays examine the role of history in family culture. His Belgian Jewish grandfather’s experience of anti-Semitism, for example, led him to adopt “Never, ever, stick your neck out” as a motto—which, Appel comments, is “probably good advice when you’re hiding from a mob of middle-class churchgoers lobbing stones, but my grandfather applied it universally.” Among the many thought-provoking pieces is “Opting Out,” which examines decisions around death and dying. Here, too, Appel mixes personal observation, family drama and his work as a physician to tease out difficult issues: “My grandfather had always said, ‘Where there is life, there is hope,’ which may explain—at least, in part—our family’s reluctance to withdraw care. But the unfortunate reality is that, where there is life, there is often false hope too.” Readers may not agree with every conclusion (“No acute sorrow, not even the death of a friend, compares with romantic rejection”), but they will understand how Appel reached them.
Entertaining, intelligent and compassionate essays that provoke reflection.Pub Date: May 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1611173710
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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