Acknowledging the balance between her heart and head, Ridha amply demonstrates what can happen when the balance is upset.
Defending the son of a famous actor, a defense attorney finds herself entangled in the case emotionally as well as legally.
Ridha’s defense of Cameron Douglas, son of Michael, came at a unique, distinct point in her career as a defense attorney. She had been in practice long enough to understand the risks inherent in defending a charming, handsome addict in a federal trafficking case. At the same time, she had not been in practice long enough to be able to have that understanding inform her every action; she wasn’t inured to the possibility that she could go down the wrong path and not stop. Cameron was the third actor in the family, after grandfather Kirk and father Michael, and his family pressed to have him moved somewhere safer than the maximum security prison in which he awaited trial. They reasoned that since he was cooperating with the investigation, he was in danger; if that news spread, his fellow inmates would likely tear him apart. He was also being denied medication deemed essential by his psychiatrist. During the case, Ridha realized that she was becoming emotionally involved, but she was not able to resist crossing the line when the system was being unjust. Feeling that she was protecting her client, she smuggled his medication into the prison. As the title of the book makes clear, Ridha was caught and prosecuted. Her hindsight provides some stinging and insightful commentary on how she allowed this to unfold (“the law has no basis in science, it does not fully correspond to even the most basic moral code”), though the prose occasionally veers into hyperbole when she writes about how she fell for Cameron.
Acknowledging the balance between her heart and head, Ridha amply demonstrates what can happen when the balance is upset.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8572-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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