A painful but wonderfully written memoir that should create greater awareness of a bizarre disorder; that so many medical...
Horrific first-person account of child abuse by a survivor with keen self-awareness, a sharp eye for detail, and an original, poetic voice.
In Munchausen by Proxy (MBP), a caretaker, usually the mother, falsifies or induces physical and/or mental illness in a dependent person, usually a child, to gain sympathy from others and control over the dependent. Gregory’s mother did this to her for many years, dragging her to doctor after doctor, coaching her to act sick, punishing her harshly if she didn’t do it convincingly enough, demanding endless treatments, tests, and invasive procedures, including surgery. At first the illnesses were relatively minor—nausea, headaches, allergies—but as her mother’s collection of home medical books provided information about more symptoms and tests, they escalated. When heart catheterization failed to reveal the abnormalities the mother insisted were there, she demanded that open-heart surgery be performed on her daughter. It was not, but nose surgery later was. At home, Gregory suffered other forms of child abuse, including beatings and semi-starvation. That she survived this miserable childhood seems remarkable, for as Marc Feldman (Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology/Univ. of Alabama) notes in his foreword, many victims of MBP do not. Amazingly, Gregory never stopped loving her manipulative mother and ineffectual but sometimes brutal father. When she learned about MBP in a college psychology course and grasped what had happened to her, she began gathering her childhood medical records, some of which she has inserted into relevant passages here. Her attempts as an adult to reconnect with her parents were at best bitterly disappointing and deeply disturbing in the case of her mother, who had begun MBP behaviors with an 11-year-old girl in her care.
A painful but wonderfully written memoir that should create greater awareness of a bizarre disorder; that so many medical professionals and social workers were oblivious to what was really going on in the Gregory household attests to the need. (8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80307-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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