Important, deeply compassionate insights on how to best prevent suicide.
In this debut memoir, a retired cop shares his life experiences and insights that contributed to his helping hundreds of people decide against suicide.
As a highway patrol officer, Briggs’ beat included San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge—a top suicide destination. Unhappy people are, just like tourists, drawn to the iconic landmark’s beautiful setting and mysterious fogs. “I know that every ten days or so, someone walks on the Bridge and never comes back,” writes Briggs of his two decades working the bridge, during which he lost only two people to suicide and helped to save more than 200. (A suicide-deterrent net is expected to be completed this year.) Now retired, Briggs is an advocate for suicide awareness and prevention. When he began, however, he had no training in such matters; what he did have was an awareness of his own losses, as well as severe health problems, grief, and depression, as detailed here with openness and honesty. His stints in the Army and as a San Quentin correctional officer also taught him to read people and situations. When approaching a suicidal person, Briggs recommends empathy, compassion, and adaptability; also crucial, he says, is focusing on the good and trying to find hope. He says to ask simple questions, such as, “Where are you from?” or “what are you doing tomorrow?” Leave ego out of it, he says; don’t be too loud, abrupt, or argumentative, and don’t deny their reality: “The first instinct when someone tells you their life is worthless is to say, ‘No, no it’s not.’ That feels like empathy to you, but to the person you’re talking to…it can feel like…one more stranger saying, ‘You’re wrong.’ ” This well-written, clear, and lively memoir helps to humanize the struggles of those in despair—including, at one point, Briggs’ own son. It offers a thoughtful, heartbreaking discussion of how suicide affects those left behind, together with revealing glimpses from one of the few survivors of a Golden Gate Bridge jump. Readers will be convinced of the importance of good crisis-intervention training and of prevention efforts, such as suicide barriers.
Important, deeply compassionate insights on how to best prevent suicide.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9904375-7-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ascend Books LLC
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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