Intimate portraits of everyday heroism and suffering.
A firsthand account of two lives that came to tragic ends.
Journalist Orkin (Ground Zero Wars, 2017, etc.) met investigative reporter Mike Ruppert in 2004 at a symposium marking the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and they later moved in together. Ten years later after their first meeting, after Ruppert committed suicide, Orkin began to produce blog entries, compiled in this book, as a way to explain his troubled state of mind. As she frankly states, “This is a flesh and blood, warts-and-all portrait written in the belief that in the end, Mike and his transcendent work and critically important ideas will prevail.” One of the more harrowing sequences involves Ruppert’s self-imposed exile in Venezuela, where he was alarmed by mysterious physical ailments and disillusioned with the country’s “Cuban-style medical system.” Here, the author includes a series of frantic emails, some her own, that effectively capture an escalating sense of confusion and panic. Some readers may be put off by Orkin’s nonstandard capitalization in these exchanges, but overall, this is a minor issue, as is the blog posts’ occasional deviation from chronological order. For instance, there’s a eulogy for Ruppert in the middle of the text and an account of the author’s first meeting with her subject at the very end. The lion’s share of the book recounts the period after Ruppert’s return to the United States, when he lived with the author in Brooklyn Heights in New York City. Readers will enjoy Orkin’s more deliberative style here, featuring solid narration and revealing dialogue, as she tells of how Ruppert’s mental health struggles and painful physical issues tested their relationship; it contrasts sharply with previous, hastily composed correspondence. The book also includes a much shorter work that’s devoted to Orkin’s mother’s life and final months. It opens with the author’s poignant assertion that her parent “did not go gentle into that good night.” Many will identify with the author’s feelings of helplessness and frustration in the face of woefully inadequate health care and social services systems. Her story of the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease may be universal in nature, but the specific details are powerful.
Intimate portraits of everyday heroism and suffering.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5007-7161-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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