An affecting work of emotional honesty and forgiveness.
A brave, moving story of a son’s devotion to his dying father.
Novelist and memoirist Thorndike (Another Way Home: A Family’s Journey Through Mental Illness, 1997, etc.) decided that when his father, a once indomitable editor at Life magazine and a reserved figure of authority, began to falter physically and mentally at the age of 92, the author was the one sibling who could put his life aside and take care of him. The decision to move from his farm in Ohio into his father’s home in Cape Cod was not altogether altruistic, he admits, since he had agreed with his brother that he would get paid for taking care of his increasingly forgetful father. When the author’s mother died more than 30 years before, “awash in depression, drugs and alcohol,” Thorndike had not been present, and he felt “negligent,” vowing “that when the time came I was going to look after my father.” The author is remarkably candid about his complex and changing feelings for his parents, who divorced ten years before his mother’s emotional slide. Neither of them was affectionate with each other or with their sons, a deep hurt that Thorndike rectified by his closeness with his own son. By caring for his confused, language-challenged father daily—feeding him, bathing him and thinking up ways to keep him stimulated—he attained enormous tenderness for and understanding of his father. Sadly, Thorndike’s father refused to talk openly about his mother, who had left her husband for other men who were more emotionally giving. The author makes the startling realization that he, by his sensuality and openness, had “become the man my mother wouldn’t leave.” Though some readers may criticize the author for being self-serving—he recognized that he had a better story in his father’s decline than the novel he was currently writing—Thorndike’s prose is serenely beautiful and his patience in caring for an Alzheimer’s patient is extremely admirable.
An affecting work of emotional honesty and forgiveness.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8040-1122-8
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Swallow Press/Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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