Warm, funny and a touch bittersweet.
A cancer survivor’s memoir with a welcome twist: a laughter-filled celebration of family.
Newspaper columnist Corrigan was 36 when she discovered a lump in her left breast. Happily married and the mother of two young daughters, she was also still very much the adoring daughter of demonstrative, exuberant George Corrigan. Being upbeat and funny was de rigueur with her optimistic father, so the author’s reaction to her breast-cancer diagnosis was to send an e-mail to about 100 people inviting them to a party one year hence to celebrate her recovery. But when George was diagnosed with bladder cancer and seemed too casual about his treatment, she became exasperated. Living in the Bay Area, she hounded his East Coast doctors by e-mail and took over the central role of information gatherer and advice dispenser. Only her own upcoming surgery kept her from heading to Philadelphia to take charge. At the same time that she was coping with her own cancer and trying to micromanage her father’s, she was busy mothering two little girls too young to understand what was happening. Tender scenes with her daughters and some frustrating ones with her strong-willed mother give context to Corrigan’s account of two battles against cancer. She also tosses into the mix funny, often self-deprecating tales of growing up in a boisterous Irish Catholic family, her adventures abroad in her 20s and her marriage to the comparatively subdued Edward. The author is, in her words, living in “the middle place—that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.” Attachments to both the family she grew up in and the family she created remain strong, but as her husband reminds her, their daughters, not her parents, are the future.
Warm, funny and a touch bittersweet.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0336-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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