An inspiring family scrapbook offering hopeful reinforcement for parents in similar situations.
A prideful father further memorializes the life of his son, who was born with Down syndrome.
In this sequel to Life As We Know It (1996), Bérubé (Literature/Penn State Univ.; The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read, 2016, etc.) continues his compassionate chronicling of his son Jamie’s life. This book picks up 20 years after the first and finds the boy in adulthood facing the many challenges of being a productive young man in the sometimes-indifferent modern world. The author addresses these contemporary hurdles through illuminating chapters on his son’s emotional development, the protectiveness and nurturing relationship with Jamie’s older brother, Nick, and Jamie’s complex sadness and confusion when his brother left for college. Embedded in a chapter on his son’s physical well-being are the author’s own perspectives on such topics as unnecessary amniocentesis and the state of American health care. In other sections, Bérubé shares anecdotes on Jamie’s trial-and-error exposures to travel and culture and how he overcame a fear of water to become a competitive swimmer at 17 in the Special Olympics. Perhaps most engaging are the stories of Jamie’s educational accomplishments and subsequent search for gainful employment, which became the subject of a heartfelt 2014 essay. To their credit, both the author and his wife have raised Jamie to the best of their abilities as compassionate parents, though the book is very much told from Bérubé’s own perspective. Janet, somewhat disappointingly, appears much less in this book than in the author’s first, and readers may miss her encouraging voice. While the author clearly paints the life of an adult with Down syndrome as one hinging on the compassion and understanding of others, he also paints Jamie’s experience and immersion into the world as a story of triumph, bravery, independence, and great self-awareness.
An inspiring family scrapbook offering hopeful reinforcement for parents in similar situations.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1931-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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