Readers seeking a more universal account of illness will be better served by Christopher Hitchens’ nervy Mortality (2012),...
A memoir of mixed maladies.
Most older people understand that illness is a constant that will swoop down and ruin a life before you know it. People of all ages know that it’s possible to do considerable harm to oneself all by oneself. Peruvian-American writer Alvarado Valdivia, having been knocked down by cancer at the age of just 30, understands the former. Having knocked himself out with beer on the night of his birthday before the diagnosis, one of many such episodes recounted here, he gets the latter, too. The author recounts the course of illness and the challenges attendant on it, and he treats, honestly but without much verve, the ups and downs of addiction and the costs it carries. Sometimes, Alvarado Valdivia can be very good, as when he writes of the mental numbness and bleakness following the diagnosis as manifested in a post-shower vision: “I felt a flash of panic when I looked at the fogged-up mirror, my smudgy reflection, and thought it reflected a dark figure walking toward me through the fog.” At times, wrestling with the realities of lymphoma, he gets on an edgy riff, as with one concerning the various secretions of the body and the weird effects of chemotherapy on them; regrettably, he throws that particular epiphany away with a too-easy likening of the scene to The Exorcist. Sometimes, he blends both illnesses with a throwaway casualness, as when he thinks to himself that it might not be a good idea to mix chemotherapy with a hangover. “Boy,” he determines, “was I fucking right.” There’s an unbridled quality to Alvarado Valdivia’s writing that sometimes comes off as exuberance but more often as indiscipline.
Readers seeking a more universal account of illness will be better served by Christopher Hitchens’ nervy Mortality (2012), Susan Sontag’s disquisitions on cancer, and son Philip Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), and other more mature reflections.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8263-4189-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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