Readers familiar with cancer or with terminal illness in general will find a source of comfort and meaning in Pausch’s...
A touching memoir of grief.
The author is the widow of Randy Pausch, who wrote the bestseller The Last Lecture and died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. Far from being a mere add-on to her late husband’s book, this work stands on its own as an eloquent testimony of a caregiver. Pausch begins by recounting the beginnings of her relationship with her husband, a promising professor at Carnegie Mellon, while she was finishing a doctorate at the University of North Carolina. They married, started a family and were living a normal life when Randy was diagnosed with cancer. Despite surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer recurred, and his case was deemed terminal. The Last Lecture made Randy’s final months unusual, but the publication of the book and the activity regarding it are largely in the background of the overall story. With her husband’s death, the author was left to parent three young children and to find new direction in her life while in her early 40s. Pausch does an admirable job of narrating the story of her husband’s illness, death and its aftermath, keeping the reader continually engaged and drawn into her world. Most notably, Pausch manages to share her pain and heartache at an intensely personal level without ever sounding self-absorbed or asking for the reader’s pity. She makes it clear that her years of marriage and family life overshadow even the pain of losing her husband, and as the book closes, she focuses on the importance of rebuilding her life and, as she puts it, dreaming new dreams.
Readers familiar with cancer or with terminal illness in general will find a source of comfort and meaning in Pausch’s story, while others will take away a lesson in how people can endure in the face of anxiety and grief.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88850-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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