An engrossing and wrenching memoir.
A family’s tragedy is revealed in agonizing detail.
Spinney’s moving and painful debut memoir recounts the devastating injury sustained by her son, Miles, a handsome, bright, and adventurous 29-year-old who crashed while snowboarding in Switzerland. Rushing to his side, the author and her family discovered that bleeding and swelling of his brain had compressed his brain stem. He fell into a coma and was hooked up to myriad tubes and a ventilator. Trying to be responsible, Miles had worn a crash helmet: it likely saved his life, but, Spinney came to realize, instant death might have been preferable. After a few weeks, he was weaned from the ventilator and given a tracheostomy; a titanium plate was affixed to the top of his skull. Food, sterile water, and multiple medications flowed into his body through tubes. From the hospital in Innsbruck, where he was treated with exemplary care, he was flown back to London, first to an intensive care unit, then to a leading brain injury hospital, and finally to a long-term care residence. Every move proved wrenching for all. Despite a host of therapies (occupational, physical, speech) and treatments, Miles made hardly any progress, officially diagnosed as MCS: minimally conscious state. In each new medical facility, Spinney found herself forced to advocate aggressively for her son’s needs; when she encountered a doctor who considered Miles’ point of view, she was “flooded with relief.” The author chronicles the next four years, during which she, her husband, Ron, and their other children upended their lives to support Miles, constantly revising their concept of hope. Suffering endless “excruciating pain, humiliation, anger, misery, frustration, loneliness, boredom,” Miles, the family reluctantly decided, would rather be dead. But ending his life was legally impossible under British law, which reserves that option only for individuals in a persistent vegetative state. Ron’s diagnosis with cancer and ensuing physical ordeal offer an additional perspective on the limitations and consequences of medical intervention.
An engrossing and wrenching memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-54-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
