A terrifying bout of blindness stirs up recollections of a dark family story in this moving memoir. In the spring of 1991 Gorman lost sight first in one eye and then in the other, victim of a rare optic-nerve disorder. In her last hours of seeing, she pored over old family photos, fixing faces in her memory and recalling especially her beloved older brother, Robin. Diagnosed as an autistic and considered beyond help, Robin was institutionalized in 1961 at age 12. The author's memories of that family crisis and of other events in Robin's short and tragic life are artfully woven into the story of her own blindness. The grandson of a noted ophthalmologist and great-nephew of the poet Ogden Nash, Robin spent 12 years in a mental institution and was working as a dishwasher when he was killed by a car at age 31. Cut off from her own world by blindness, Gorman came to understand her brother's awful alienation. ``In my blindness,'' she says, ``I found my brother again and I followed him in his childhood footsteps. I stood inside his shadow and occupied his darkness.'' In the chapters recalling scenes from their childhood, Gorman skillfully adopts an ingenuous narrative voice, describing, with the naivetÇ of the child she was then, Robin's anguish, her mother's sadness, her father's and grandfather's firmness, and everyone's silences. It is an affecting account, as is her story of her own mysterious blindness. Gradually her sight does return, though imperfectly. The story comes full circle when she finds among Robin's belongings a piece of amber glass, one that he used as a child to spot crabs underwater, and discovers that with his ``seeing glass,'' colors sharpen, shadows appear, and once again she can read. Two memorable stories in one. (First serial to Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 2, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-061-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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