Such a literary flourish is an exception to the matter-of-fact approach that characterizes the narrative, where most of the...
An inspirational memoir by a writer who refuses to be defined by his paralysis, as he comes to terms with the unknown man who shot him.
As an intelligent, talented, athletic and slightly rebellious 13-year-old from what was then the ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, McGill experienced a tragedy in 1982 that would lead to epiphany. Walking home with a friend on New Year’s Day, he fell victim to a senseless, apparently motiveless gunshot from an unseen sniper. His initial recovery required six months in the hospital, where he learned to adjust to his new life as a quadriplegic, discovering the ways that he could take care of himself and the limits to what he could do. The incident would transform his life, in surprisingly positive ways as well as predictably negative ones, as he explains in this memoir addressed to the man who shot him, a man he will never know but to whom he forever feels linked. “Until I speak to you, I can never fully close this door,” he writes. “And I need that resolution. I think I’ve earned it.” He gives his shooter a name, a race and a plausibility that led him to this unfocused violence. But while he’s addressing the “Marcus” he has invented, he is also exorcising justifiable anger and offering his own life as an example of the rewards one can reap by accepting loss and learning the value of love. “I didn’t write this book for you, Marcus,” he writes. “My reasons for writing this are bigger than you or me, my friend. I wrote this book to release demons into the warm night air.”
Such a literary flourish is an exception to the matter-of-fact approach that characterizes the narrative, where most of the lessons learned are plainspoken, but also hard won.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9307-3
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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