Emotionally compelling and intellectually rich, particularly for those with a personal connection to the issue.
Tormented for years by enervating symptoms, the author spent most of her 30s dealing with—and trying to understand—chronic illness.
“To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage,” writes poet and Yale Review editor O’Rourke, “but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.” Here, the author constructs that story from building blocks of personal narrative and science journalism, with deep dives into the technicalities of the immune system and the microbiome. The personal sections are engaging and well written—“What I had wasn’t just an illness now; it was an identity, a membership in a peculiarly demanding sect. I had joined the First Assembly of the Diffusely Unwell. The Church of Fatigue, Itching, and Random Neuralgia. Temple Beth Ill”—as O’Rourke ably documents her myriad appointments with both Western and alternative practitioners, toting thick stacks of medical records, exploring various autoimmune diagnoses and treatment plans. Some are bizarre and/or dubious, others disgusting but legit (fecal microbiota transplant). Just when the author felt totally lost in the labyrinth of Lyme disease, prescribed the very antibiotics she believed had damaged her body in the first place, she finally found the beginning of a road to health. Though O'Rourke roundly rejects the notion that illness and suffering are somehow balanced by spiritual benefits, her conclusion offers hope. “Today, as a new paradigm for disease is emerging—pushed into full view by the coronavirus pandemic and the epidemic of long COVID—we must amend the simple ‘germ causes disease, body overcomes disease’ model….A holistic, individualized approach to medicine may matter more than was once thought.”
Emotionally compelling and intellectually rich, particularly for those with a personal connection to the issue.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59463-379-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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