A moving portrait of “young love turning into old love” in the face of unexpected life challenges.
An award-winning author recounts how her husband’s treatment to alleviate chronic back pain wreaked unexpected havoc on his health and their relationship.
When Goldman’s (Losing My Sister, 2012, etc.) husband, Henry, saw an advertisement for injections that alleviated spine problems, he eagerly made an appointment. Surgery had been ineffective in curing chronic back pain, and engaging in the athletic activities he loved—jogging, racquetball, and tennis—had become impossible. Rather than cure him, the treatment left Henry paralyzed from the waist down. The doctor insisted all would be well despite disturbing signs to the contrary. Goldman, who was “too timid to take charge,” suddenly found herself having to fight a medical establishment that could not explain what had gone wrong. Henry did regain some, but not all, feeling; with physical therapy, he also regained the ability to walk. But for the next several years, he endured worsening pain, blood clots, knee replacement, and, eventually, total shoulder replacement due to an “altered gait and awkward posture.” When the pair eventually tried to take legal action to compensate for Henry’s suffering, they were told they did not have a strong enough case to sue for damages. The author watched her husband struggle and observed how extreme stress caused her to display her most “unlovely self.” At the same time, she also pondered their past and the new normal of their present. The shifts that threatened to tear their relationship apart forced both Goldman and her husband to assume new roles and expand old identities in ways they could never have foreseen. For all their trials, they emerged more bonded than ever. Honest and compassionate, Goldman’s book is a life-affirming story that celebrates the grit that goes into making a long-term marriage work.
A moving portrait of “young love turning into old love” in the face of unexpected life challenges.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54394-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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