A quality addition to the literature on pain.
A meandering yet erudite exploration of the representation of chronic pain in history and popular culture.
Olstein (English/Univ. of Texas; Late Empire, 2017, etc.) suffers from chronic migraines. In total, she estimates, she has had a headache for 9.5 years of her life. Throughout this slim, perceptive book, she wrestles with the challenge of expressing something that is essentially indescribable: “all pain” is “unknowable except while being lived.” As a poet, the author employs lyrical language (“left brow like a pressed bruise, an overripe peach you accidentally stuck your fingers into; top of head a china vase in a vise tightening, all angled echo and clamor”) as well as rhetorical questions and litanies in the attempt to characterize her pain. She includes alarmingly extensive lists of incidental migraine symptoms, medicines and therapies she has tried (“our fickle, beloved cures”), and side effects she has experienced. Her surprising points of reference range from Antiphon, the ancient philosopher who taught pain avoidance, to the TV show House, which starred a pain pill–gobbling misanthrope who solved medical mysteries. It’s harder to appreciate the relevance of a long discussion of Joan of Arc. Olstein seems to take Joan as a model for women speaking out in defense of their subjective experiences (in Joan’s case, hearing voices). All the same, the passages from her trial transcript are overlong. In general, Olstein relies too much on quotations from other thinkers—though, surprisingly, not Susan Sontag. While the book joins a conversation rekindled by Anne Boyer, Leslie Jamison, and other contemporary authors, it is not quite as memorable as its antecedents. Still, Olstein’s blending of the personal and the academic is compelling, and her themes of catharsis, denial, and causality are well worth exploring. “Does our pain define us?” she asks. Ultimately, she concludes that pain has no essential meaning and is all up to chance. Yet there is dignity in resisting it—and in capturing it in words.
A quality addition to the literature on pain.Pub Date: March 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-942658-68-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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