Inspirational proof that there’s nothing like a death scare to put life into perspective.
A health crisis provides an accomplished cartoonist with the richest material of her career.
Though there’s never an ideal time for someone to learn she has cancer, Marchetto (Just Who the Hell Is She, Anyway?, not reviewed) found it particularly ironic that the worst news she’d ever received came during the best stretch of adult life she’d ever enjoyed. She’d started selling cartoons to the New Yorker and was a fixture in other New York magazines as well. She had fabulous friends, fabulous shoes and an overstuffed apartment she could afford. Best of all, in her early 40s and never married, she had fallen madly in love with a celebrity restaurateur who somehow preferred her to all the leggy models who patronized Da Silvano’s and fawned all over him. Then she discovered the lump, learned she had breast cancer and realized that she had let her health insurance lapse. From such potentially depressing material, the author has drawn a triumphant, biting, self-deprecating, journalistically detailed and frequently hilarious account of true love conquering all. In flashbacks to the years before her diagnosis, Marchetto details the conspicuous consumption and competitive cattiness of life in New York magazine circles, before 9/11 put such frivolities on hold. A magazine assignment led her to Silvano’s restaurant, and her romance with the owner changed her life. But would Silvano go through with the marriage once he learned of the cancer? Would Marchetto be able to receive the best medical treatment without insurance? Would the side effects of all those biopsies and treatments allow her to continue the drawing that constituted her livelihood? Somehow, the graphic artist has taken the tone of Sex and the City into the cancer ward, with a happy ending that makes her memoir seem all the more life-affirming.
Inspirational proof that there’s nothing like a death scare to put life into perspective.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26357-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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