Absorbing reminiscence of a heart in disintegration. Senior Time writer Morrow (Fishing in the Tiber, 1988, etc.) suffered his first heart attack at the age of 36. His second came 17 years later, and it is this insult to the body that he recounts here. He describes in such frightening detail the trajectory of a heart attack's passage through the body that the reader has to set the book down from time to time and take a deep, reassuring breath. His picture of recovery is less scary but just as affecting, as he remembers ``eternities of ceiling timestaring, thinking. In New York Hospital, I lay hour after hour in the passive patient's twilight, learning to accept the needles and tubes and noises and light.'' Thankfully, Morrow never slides into bathos or self-pity. Quite the opposite: He is often angry at himself for the weakness of his heart muscle, recalling, ``I blame myself. I rant at myself,'' but catching himself by noting, ``This is not an intelligent way to get well.'' During his recovery, Morrow remembers bits and pieces of his life: his hard-working, hard- drinking journalist parents; his travels into hellish places like Bosnia, where a Serbian concentration-camp commandant barks, ``I am a humanist!''; his youthful efforts at reiterating his hero Ernest Hemingway's path. Morrow's well-wrought reflections on these episodes of a life interestingly lived, miniature essays in themselves, stand like islands in the streams of consciousness that this memoir often assumes. And fine islands they are, full of memorable lines: ``I have seen it call forth too many slurred stupidities to buy the sophomoric lines, In vino veritas.'' ``Leave the hatred to those who need it.'' These and other sharp-edged reflections make us glad that Morrow is still with usand that he has given us yet another fine book.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51870-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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