Readers may feel vaguely gratified that an apparently nice person made it through a difficult period, but it’s hardly...
A dull, inconsequential account of an affable slab of beefcake’s medical troubles.
Sorbo, best known for his starring role in the hit TV program Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, recounts the catastrophic effects of an aneurysm and a series of strokes on his life and career. At the height of his stardom, the conspicuously healthy, clean-living actor suffered a bizarre and statistically unlikely health crisis that left the him persistently weak and dizzy, plagued by migraines and vision loss and unable to maintain his muscular physique or even swing a prop sword on the set of the show. Sorbo is candid about the hopelessness and resentment that characterized his slow recovery, his frustration with contradictory medical advice and holistic therapies of varying effectiveness and the stress his condition placed on his new marriage. Unfortunately, the author, at least on the evidence here, is such a resolutely bland personality—a middle-of-the-road guy in temperament, taste and sensibility—that it is difficult to muster much interest in his predicament. His anecdotes about life on the set of Hercules are flavorless and mild, his observations on love, family and the capriciousness of fate banal and his regular-guy persona precludes any surprising, salacious or otherwise interesting revelations about his idyllic upbringing as a healthy young jock or his relatively smooth ascension to cult stardom. Sorbo’s medical problems, while clearly devastating to the author and his family and friends, are not the stuff of high drama; he was knocked down, felt lousy for a period and slowly recovered.
Readers may feel vaguely gratified that an apparently nice person made it through a difficult period, but it’s hardly compelling reading.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-82036-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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