A provocative, poetic foray into melancholia from both a personal and historical perspective. While working as a psychiatric caseworker in Missoula, Minn., first-time author Smith is thrust into a depression that even the newest antidepressants can—t alleviate. In attempting to understand his melancholia, Smith researches this mystifying condition, which continues to afflict people worldwide. Regardless of how it originates, concludes Smith, clinical depression results from biochemical changes in the brain. And half of those with one episode relapse within 18 months, while some will be plagued by depression for life. Smith is particularly effective in describing his own depression, when everyday details overwhelm him and his only company is “Mr. Shoulder,” who monitors his every thought and mood to the point of paralyzing him. He writes “that my life felt distant even to me.” Also intriguing is Smith’s chronicle of society’s changing views of depression. In Renaissance Europe, in Elizabethan England, and to the 19th-century Romantics in Germany and Great Britain, depressive illness was deemed a great gift. People even feigned melancholia, because it was considered an experience that deepened and enriched one’s soul. With our society’s emphasis on productivity, depression is regarded as an unwelcome intrusion that is costly to corporate America. The contemporary solution is a quick fix that allows expedient return to the marketplace. And it’s this quick chemical fix that troubles Smith. Only when he abandons medication and allows his illness to awaken him spiritually and metaphysically does he conquer his depression. Smith continues to take jobs to help others with psychological problems and brain injuries, and is critical of patients— families “who preferred the memory [of the victim when healthy] to the present reality—[and whose] spouses had all filed for divorce.” Brimming with insight and intelligence, an endearing memoir. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-86547-542-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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