The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before...
A son’s unsentimental attempt to unravel the mysteries of his father’s life and come to terms with its contradictions.
Taylor, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, began writing this memoir after the death of his father, who for nearly two decades had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was either unable or unwilling to talk about his past. A few years earlier, the author had discovered that he had a stepbrother, a man whose memories of their father, in his pre-Parkinson’s days, were entirely unlike his own. Taylor reconstructs scenes from his childhood and adolescence to show his father’s downward spiral—from engaged parent to a man so deep in dementia that he could not distinguish his son from a giraffe and believed he was being kidnapped by enemies. Starting in his teens, Taylor began sharing with his mother the role of caretaker. He admits to being impatient, cross, frustrated and angered by his father’s strange behaviors. It was only later when he found clinical names for the symptoms that he could begin to understand what was happening, and with understanding came guilt over his shortcomings as a caretaker. Taylor’s frankness in describing his demented father may be seen as an invasion of privacy, but it is clear that he loved him and wanted desperately to know him and understand him, going to great lengths to track down his father’s relatives, former teaching colleagues and anyone who might provide helpful memories. While Taylor’s father remains something of an enigma to him and to the reader, the unpleasant truths about being a caretaker are made plain, as are the real horrors of witnessing the destruction of a loved one’s body, personality, mind and memory.
The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before giving to anyone touched by Parkinson’s disease.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-86207-955-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Granta UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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