An inspiring story of mettle and optimism in the face of overwhelming challenges.
A man recounts his struggles to overcome the debilitating effects of a severe brain bleed.
On July 18, 1999, debut author Buff finished a round of golf. He returned to the clubhouse and collapsed. He was diagnosed with “a malformation of veins and arteries that are sometimes weak in places and can burst.” He underwent two microscopic brain surgeries, the first to remove the pooled blood around his cerebellum and brain stem, and the second to deal with the arteriovenous malformation. At age 36, this father of three young children saw his life forever changed. He remained in the hospital, connected to feeding and breathing tubes (the latter replaced by a tracheotomy), for six weeks. Buff reconstructed details of his hospital stay from stories he was told by family and friends; he has no memory of that period. He was transferred to Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey, where he received extensive physical, occupational, and speech therapy, and returned home in time for Christmas. But years of rehab remained ahead. Despite physical, personal, and financial setbacks, the author employs a generally positive tone in these pages: “God has blessed me with a unique personality trait. I will do something over and over again until I am satisfied with the outcome. It worked for my sports; now it was working for my rehabilitation.” Indeed, athletic activity played a significant role in his life—skiing, surfing, football, soccer, baseball, and especially golf. He highlights the stark contrast between his former routines and his post-surgery days by opening many chapters with joyful recollections of his youth followed by sections describing the initial brain trauma and his gradual recuperation. The only bitterness he displays concerns his wife’s decision to leave him in November 2000: “She would not live with a cripple the rest of her life.…I thought her love for me would stand up through all adversity. Obviously, it couldn’t.” After several years living with his parents, Buff now has his own home, drives a car, and even plays golf. His mission: to encourage others to “keep going.”
An inspiring story of mettle and optimism in the face of overwhelming challenges.Pub Date: July 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4502-2662-2
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Toplink Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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