A year of grief and love, forthrightly revealed.
All was going well for character actor Beaver (featured on HBO’s Deadwood) and his wife Cecily (acting teacher, casting director, daughter of comic Don Adams) when suddenly their American Dream turned into their personal nightmare.
Jim’s father, Cecily’s father and other family members became ill. Their toddler Maddie was diagnosed as autistic. Then, just when the Beaver family was preparing to move into their new home, Cecily was diagnosed with cancer. By spring she was dead. To help cope, Jim composed thoughtful midnight e-mails for 150 family and friends. During the course of a year, his messages gained wide circulation by being forwarded to thousands of readers. Edited for this book, they form a genuine memorial: sometimes clinical, frequently sentimental, always openhearted. Early, hopeful entries tell of chemo, transfusions, blood tests, oncology consults, CT scans and MRIs. It wasn’t long before Cecily developed an inflammation surrounding her heart and pneumonia that required a ventilator. Throughout the winter of his young wife’s illness, Beaver maintained that “the fight has only begun and has a long, long way to go.” Readers, of course, know the inevitable end. After this devastating loss, Jim’s nocturnal musings turned to his daughter, who with early intervention soon shed the diagnosis of autism, along with memories of her lost mother. The author warmly acknowledges the friends, family, helpers, babysitters, companions and bringers of good thoughts, food and love. His passionate book is about how we mourn, a topic familiar sooner or later to every reader. Beaver treats it with uncommon honesty and a bit of wisdom.
A year of grief and love, forthrightly revealed.Pub Date: April 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15564-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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