An introspective, elegantly written remembrance that finds hope and joy in adversity.
After a complicated childbirth, a pediatric physician reflects on the trials and rewards of raising a disabled child in this debut memoir.
The book opens in medias res with Lee in her role as a critical care fellow in a pediatric intensive care unit, as she and her team race to save the lives of siblings who’ve been severely injured in a car crash. The memoir then goes on to describe the birth of the author’s second child, Josephine, during which Lee suffered a uterine rupture, which led to her child’s suffering a severe brain injury. She discusses how she and her husband, Jason, an emergency medicine physician, adapted to home life with a child with special needs and her own initial struggle to bond with a daughter whose movements and responses were minimal. Josephine was diagnosed with dyskinetic cerebral palsy and other conditions, and the memoir charts the joys and the setbacks of her early life as she started school and began to communicate using technology that tracked her gaze. The work also addresses how Lee found inner peace as her perception of Josephine changed. Lee’s writing is searingly frank, sometimes relating difficult emotions that many would be reluctant to share. On encountering a father whose child is dying, for instance, she notes: “I had a sudden secret desire to trade places with him, imagining that the experience of pure grief would be preferable to being consumed by shame and guilt, by gnawing uncertainty about the severity of Josephine’s disabilities.” The work tenderly and observantly tracks the author’s evolving emotions regarding her daughter, offering heartfelt reflections tempered by a sense of realism: “I accept that Jo may never learn math, whether because she is unwilling or unable. But she’s funny. She likes to tease. And I love that about her.” At times, Lee’s blunt style can make for a distressing read, as when she describes encountering a patient with “an abdomen full of dead gut” at the hospital. However, the way that she starts to reevaluate her clinical detachment proves compelling.
An introspective, elegantly written remembrance that finds hope and joy in adversity.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-538246-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ten16 Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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