A tender meditation on the hope that one can discover in the darkest despair.
In this memoir, a woman recollects how faith helped her endure extraordinary travails.
In 1994, debut author Roby was happily married and preparing to start a new job as a teacher. Then her husband, Henry, suddenly and inexplicably died, and at the age of 25, she found herself a single mother of one child, seven-and-a-half months pregnant with another. In 1997, when her daughter, Jordan, was 2-and-a-half years old, she suddenly collapsed and was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital. She suffered from congestive heart failure, and her doctors determined that her heart was so weak that she was a candidate for a transplant. She was approved for the procedure and transferred to a new hospital, while Roby stayed at a nearby Ronald McDonald house. The operation’s risks were considerable; even if it was successful, there was still a possibility that Jordan would need another transplant a decade or so later. The surgery went well, and the road to recovery seemed promising, if fraught with challenges. However, a few years later, Jordan fell seriously ill again, and her organs started to shut down. Doctors attempted to save her life, but the strain proved too much for the young girl, who finally died. The bulk of Roby’s recollection is devoted to her account of Jordan’s struggle to stay alive, but she also discusses her own youthful Christian awakening and the abuse that she weathered as a child. Roby tells this heartbreaking tale with affecting emotion, but she’s also relentlessly optimistic, repeatedly cataloging the many things for which she’s deeply grateful. The whole story feels like less of a lament than a kind of love letter to those who supported her during her time of profound distress. She also provides a thoughtful reflection on the faith that sustained her through her many trials, offering a kind of Christian theodicy: “There is evil in this world. Some bear witness to it, while others endure its devastation and subsequent hardship. In acknowledging there is evil, one must also acknowledge there is good, for one cannot exist without the other.”
A tender meditation on the hope that one can discover in the darkest despair.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6140-5
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2017
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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