In a memoir that is both funny and furious, tales of private and public adventure from a nationally known radio and TV reporter who is paralyzed from the chest down. Since an automobile accident nearly 20 years ago left Hockenberry a paraplegic, he has won national awards, including an Emmy, for his work as a journalist with National Public Radio and ABC-TV. In his wheelchair, he has reported from Somalia, Jerusalem during the intifada, and Kurdish camps on the border between Turkey and Iran following Desert Storm. He has ducked SCUD missiles in Israel and intrusive questions hurled at him by total strangers in public places. One flight attendant opened a conversation by asking, ``Have you ever thought about killing yourself?'' Her follow-up question: ``Are you able to do it with a woman?'' Hockenberry recounts a life that is full of triumph and humiliation, romance and harsh reality, inventive strategies and daily frustration. When he was studying to be a musician in college just after the accident, he invented a mouth-operated instrument that would let him control the pedals on his piano. But even his persistence hasn't found a resolution to the problem of finding a New York City taxi driver who will help him load his wheelchair in the trunk. Yet this is no simple chronicle of obstacles overcome. Hockenberry looks at himself, his family, and his surroundings with both detachment and empathy, finding kindness from Iranians even as they shouted ``Death to Americans'' and cruelty among his relatives, who buried an uncle in a mental institution for more than 30 years. He also reflects on America's disturbingly complacent view that ``normal'' is white, middle-class, and whole. Challenged and challenging, the author offers a self- portrait of a man in a wheelchair, neither hero nor poster boy, that should help to rattle stereotypes a little further. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6078-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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