EXPLORING THE LABYRINTHA Guide for Healing and Spiritual GrowthWest, Melissa Gayle
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7679-0356-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
Extraordinary portraits of five dying people who contemplate ending their own lives, sensitively and movingly written by a physician who has thought long and hard about the issue of assisted suicide. Shavelson, who combines careers in medicine and journalism, encountered assisted suicide early: When he was 14, his mother, suffering from Crohn's disease and depression, made him promise to help her end her life should she so wish (she's still alive). Spurred by the response to Derek Humphry's Final Exit and the public debate over Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Shavelson contacted family support organizations and hospices for the dying to find his subjects. Each has a unique story. Renee Sahm, a resourceful woman with brain cancer, has two plans: (a) to fight for survival and (b) to kill herself. Shavelson anguishes at her bedside when she takes the fatal dose of liquid morphine and vodka. Pierre Nadeau, a proud and body-conscious young trapeze artist with AIDS, at first seems determined to commit suicide at a certain point of bodily deterioration. His story reveals not only how the dying continually redefine what they can live with but how the gay community handles assisted suicide. When Gene Robbins, a lonely widower who fears a third disabling stroke, contacts the Hemlock Society for information on how to kill himself, he gets not just brochures but some surprising personal assistance. This disturbing account of an overeager free-lance practitioner of euthanasia is the only one in which Shavelson uses pseudonymns. In recounting the poignant story of Kelly Niles, a 33-year-old quadraplegic who decides his life is no longer bearable and that starvation is his only way out, the author explores the rights of the disabled. In the final and perhaps most heart-rending story, a terminally ill woman chooses suicide but only after she and her family have their last farewells. A powerful argument in favor of legalizing assisted suicide, reinforced by haunting photographs taken by the author.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80100-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Why is the publication date timed for the sixth anniversary of 9/11? For the maximization of profits, of course.
Slender, slight collection of aphoristic essays by British art critic, novelist and political activist Berger (Here is Where We Meet, 2006, etc.).
“Are you still a Marxist?” Berger, echoing an interlocutor, asks in one piece later in the book. He answers in the affirmative, but not before writing, gnomically, “Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home but a chosen destination” (yes, for that way lies London, the Pantheon, and points beyond) and urging, “The consumer is essentially somebody who feels, or is made to feel, lost, unless he or she is consuming” (oh, blessed circularity!). The question, the answers, are characteristic of Berger; the approach is of signal interest when approaching, say, a piece by Tatlin or Chagall or Van Gogh, much less so when brought to bear on literal matters of life and death, for does anyone but Harold Pinter need take notice when such observations as “What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair” are offered for public—yes—consumption? Berger wrestles with the obvious questions: Why the despair? (Living in a refugee camp tends to focus the mind.) Why do they hate us? (That requires a few paragraphs.) Why are terrorists so willing to blow themselves up? (To blow us up.) But then, grammar be damned, “if a kamikaze martyr could see with their own eyes, before he or she died, the immediate consequences of their explosion, they might well reconsider the appropriateness of their steadfast decision.” Concluding, in good Marxist manner, that the pursuit of profit is a pitiless business and that corporations “consistently wage their own ‘jihad’ against any target that opposes the maximization of their profits,” Berger paints himself into a distant corner of irrelevance, even if he does get off a few good zingers.
Why is the publication date timed for the sixth anniversary of 9/11? For the maximization of profits, of course.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42509-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
© Copyright 2026 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.
