An enlightening and often moving memoir of one man’s struggle to live with a chronic and debilitating condition.
A journalist recounts his decadeslong struggle with epilepsy.
Veteran journalist Eichenwald (500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, 2012, etc.), a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, engrossingly relates his experiences with frequent epileptic seizures and the impact this condition has had on his life: “I have lived most of my life knowing I could be seconds from falling to the ground, seizing, burning, freezing, or worse….For years, I believed that each day might be my last, that I would die from an accident or a seizure or by my own hand. I lived in a boundless minefield, never knowing if I was a step away from triggering an explosion.” The author focuses mainly on his younger years, when he entered college up through his struggles to establish a foothold in his career. Central to his story are the grueling efforts he and his family faced trying to ensure his remittance to Swarthmore College. Through a combination of gross medical incompetence and disturbing administrative offenses within the college, Eichenwald was forced to leave during his first semester; he had to seek out extensive legal and medical intervention before he was able to continue his education. The author goes on to recount similar struggles in launching his early career. Throughout, Eichenwald brings his measured journalistic directness to the various dramas that enfold. His experiences pointedly reflect the challenges of trying to live a normal life while at the mercy of his condition, but more expansively, he relates the challenges that many disabled people face. He concludes each chapter with interview quotes, diary entries, and letters by various family members, close friends, and physicians. Though he mentions having kept these records as a means to organize his thoughts in response to increasing memory loss, their inclusion adds a somewhat cloying inspirational element that slightly undermines the strength and authority of the story he has to tell.
An enlightening and often moving memoir of one man’s struggle to live with a chronic and debilitating condition.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59362-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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