It’s no easy thing to provide a glimpse into the churning melancholia of bipolar lows, but Simon manages it—with...
A cross-country road trip—mostly lucid, sometimes scary: the bipolar Simon interviews other bipolar people who have been successfully treated and now lead highly functional lives, while she regularly gets pounded by her own disorder.
She opens with a guided tour into her mental illness, telling how in high school she became jittery, then confused, layering anxieties upon anxieties, finding it increasingly difficult to speak or stop the tears, moving toward a paranoia that convinced her the CIA was out to kidnap her cat. The tour is impressive—with its darting sentences, stops and starts, gasped breaths—for the way it conveys the smothering, agitated brain fever Simon was feeling. She gets help, is given medication to bring the chemistry into a semblance of balance, and it isn’t long before she formulates the idea of a road trip to find her herd of people: bipolars who have laid siege to their disorder. She swings low out of New York and west across the southern tier, talking to others about the circumstances of their disorder, what went right for them, what things they did that gave them a leg up. This is no easy road; Simon knows, as do her interviewees, that one’s mercurial nature can leak through the medication, and she knows the fear that comes with hearing the biochemical and psychological cues that that’s happening. Each time, she does what’s needed to reestablish her sense of self: sob, or soak in the sun and read a magazine, or flee. She learns to give herself a break, to cast a wary eye on guilt, shame, and stigma: “I made my top priority to be OK in my body and in my mind. . . .” It sounds simple. But it wasn’t.
It’s no easy thing to provide a glimpse into the churning melancholia of bipolar lows, but Simon manages it—with considerable effect indeed.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-4659-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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