Banal memoirs of woman who for the past 17 years has lived with Parkinson’s disease, a chronic neurological condition that affects movement, speech, and sometimes mental functioning. At age 47, Grady-Fitchett, a physically active woman, began experiencing the first symptoms: stiffness in her left arm and loss of dexterity in her left hand, Her clichÇ-ridden account of her life before and after diagnosis is divided into 63 “entries,” of which 54 are brief chapters of flat prose and 9 are much briefer, inoffensive poems. She tells sketchily of her first three marriages and divorces, her career as a model, and her entry into the Florida real-estate business. In the late 1970s, as her third marriage was ending, she bought a farm near Asheville, N.C. She moved there in 1983, stocked it with assorted animals, and lived there mostly alone until after her fourth marriage in 1990. Her strong-willed efforts to live independently on the farm and to care for her beloved horses, geese, and other creatures constitute a substantial portion of her memoirs, although there is mention of her creative-writing class and a short account of a legal squabble involving some Florida property. After 1991, the focus shifts to management of her gradually deteriorating health. She seeks advice from various doctors, tries various medications, and ultimately opts for a fetal-tissue transplant, in which tissue from an aborted fetus is implanted in the brain. In the book’s final entries, she tells of undergoing a battery of tests at the University of Colorado, where the surgery is to be performed. However, she has curiously chosen to end her memoirs while still awaiting the risky and experimental procedure that, if successful, could greatly improve her condition but, if unsuccessful, could leave her much worse off. Neither engaging nor informative; in fact, forgettable.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86490-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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