While the connections here between astronomy and psychology are ultimately subjective, its emotional message comes through:...
A nature journalist’s memoir of her husband’s battle with depression, balanced against her own discovery of the stars.
In opening, DeBlieu (Wind, 1998) reminds us that 1995 was the year when a Japanese amateur astronomer discovered the comet Hyukatake. At that same time, her mother-in-law was diagnosed with a serious case of cancer, and her husband, Jeff, was traveling back and forth between coastal North Carolina and his mother’s home in Mississippi. We learn a bit of the history of their courtship, when both were reporters in Oregon, and of DeBlieu’s first impressions of Jeff’s family, a colorful bunch of southerners. We also learn that Jeff’s mother suffered from depression and had even been hospitalized for it. And as his mother’s cancer later progressed, Jeff’s own stress began to show. But the comet and the stars also had a powerful emotional effect on DeBlieu. Previously, she’d barely known the names of three or four constellations, but now she began to go out at night with binoculars and look up at the sky, almost overcome by its beauty and mystery. The narrative of her growing knowledge of the stars and of the history of astronomy alternates with Jeff’s story, which entered a crisis stage after his mother’s death. Apparently small events ignited arguments, and the couple’s young son was caught in the middle. Eventually, Jeff’s work began to suffer. Given a choice between resigning and taking medical leave, he chose the latter. As he recovered, DeBlieu built a metaphorical bridge between her own growing understanding of the stars and her understanding of the depths of the human mind. With the arrival of Hale-Bopp in 1998, she and her husband celebrated his emergence from depression.
While the connections here between astronomy and psychology are ultimately subjective, its emotional message comes through: well written, often moving.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-070-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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