A memoir detailing the loss of a mother from ovarian cancer in 1959, when the author was a young teenager, and the shadow the experience cast over her own life. Novelist Furman (Tuxedo Park, 1986, etc.) grew up in New York City, summering in the New Jersey countryside. Her grandmother too died of the disease. As the author says early on here of her adult self, “the medium through which I felt most intensely was still my mother’s death.” In recounting an ordinary enough past, paradise or not, Furman displays an unmemorable prose style, rendering the details of her rites of passage—for example, the beginning of menstruation. Yes, now she is able to connect the onset of her own menarche with the organ that “betrayed” her mother, but the point falls flat. With her father’s remarriage, Furman locates herself in the age-old tale of the unwanted stepchild. An unhappy, self-romanticizing young adult reading Fitzgerald and Chandler, she attempted halfheartedly to injure herself and was confined for a period to a psychiatric hospital. Images linger of the terminally ill mother moving her car from one side of the street to the other in accordance with local regulations, or ordering Chicken Kiev at the Russian Tea Room, but none of this detail seems to matter, to tell us any more about her; even the details of the wording commissioned for her mother’s headstone fail to stir. There are occasional surprising moments of illumination in Furman’s world-weariness. Of an aunt’s recollection of her quarrel with the author’s mother: “I listened to her hopeless recital of the quarrel and the cause, and I wished I never had to hear about it again.” Later, married, raising an adopted son, and living in Texas, Furman underwent the prophylactic removal of her own ovaries. May be of interest to others who’ve lost loved ones to this disease, but too prosaic in the telling to sustain most readers’ engagement. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-9657468-4-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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