Alternately buoyant with youthful optimism and heartbreakingly painful; a touching account of a striking journey.
A memoir offers a tribute to a young man of indomitable spirit who died too soon.
Richards (Crossing the River Sorrow, 2013) met Monty Martin McDonald in 2001 in Lakeview, Oregon, when he showed up at her front door the day of his mother’s funeral. The author had seen him for the first time a few days earlier, sitting by the curb with his mother, selling lemonade. Shortly thereafter, his mother committed suicide, leaving behind three children. At age 8, McDonald was the youngest. Over the next three years, he and Richards formed a unique bond—a middle-age nurse/teacher and a young boy with a drive to forge his place in the world. Then McDonald moved to Key Peninsula in Washington state to live with his grandmother and father, and Richards and her husband headed to Moscow, Idaho. The author and McDonald stayed in touch. On Feb. 21, 2013, 19-year-old McDonald called to report he had a rare form of bone cancer that had invaded his knee. Richards immediately drove to Seattle to meet him at the hospital. What follows are the excruciating details of his courageous, good-humored, yet ultimately doomed struggle to overcome this cruel disease, interspersed with Richards’ memories of her own childhood and young adulthood. The author is a skillful wordsmith, so it isn’t until about halfway through this short volume that readers will realize the sad, lovingly textured story is as much about Richards’ rediscovery of Christianity during her friendship with McDonald as it is about his fateful odyssey. Nonbelievers may find the heavy dose of religiosity an intrusion into what could easily have been a more universal, metaphysical treatise on the nature of suffering and the beauty of life’s simple joys. Yet the prose remains riveting. Here is the author’s first impression of Lakeview: “The arid landscape at the foot of the Warner Mountains was as disheartening as the scent of sunbaked sagebrush, the whirling dust devils that circled our car, and the swarms of kamikaze locust obliterating our windshield with a thick yellow goo.”
Alternately buoyant with youthful optimism and heartbreakingly painful; a touching account of a striking journey.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973623-98-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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