A strikingly honest, if occasionally repetitious, look at a unique life.
King (Overcoming Oppression, 2017, etc.) presents a memoir of triumph and tragedy.
The author begins by stating that he’s an unemployed, gay, African-American doctor and a “psychic empath.” In 2009, when this book begins, he was not doing well physically, financially, or socially—and he goes on to expound on all these facets of his existence in the pages that follow, which then leap back in time to events that happened well before the author’s birth, including the enslavement of his ancestors. The author spent the bulk of his childhood in Erie, Pennsylvania. His father was also a doctor, and his mother was a professor of mathematics. Although, by outward appearances, the family was successful and upwardly mobile, they were far from content in their circumstances. The author tells of facing immense racism in his daily life; he also says that his older brother would go out of his way to scare him as a child and that his parents “interrogated and chastised [him] for any imperfect behavior.” Nevertheless, the author was able to escape Erie for Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, then Harvard University, both as an undergraduate and a medical student. He then embarked on a career as a physician; in time, he discovered his sexuality, traveled to faraway places, married and divorced a woman whom he characterizes as overbearing, battled alcoholism, and dated a string of difficult men, including one who regularly flew into rages. Mixed into these accounts is a hefty amount of self-analysis as the author reflects on his attempts to obtain “perfection” and his belief in ingrained “slave-based behaviors.” He also states that he views the writing of this book as a form of healing. Over the course of this revealing memoir, the author offers his readers some brutal details, including his experience as a victim of rape. However, later in the book, the author recalls his struggles in the medical field; these accounts include lengthy, vicious dialogues with superiors who claimed, for instance, that the author was taking too much time treating patients. But although King’s stories of his experiences as a physician certainly shed light on his character, his complaints about the profit-driven medical system eventually become repetitive and, at times, over-the-top, as when he asserts that “the chief operating officer and the medical director–CEO, are both mentally ill.” A great portion of this memoir, however, is devoted to the author’s long-term romantic relationships, and they include moments that range from the absurd to the tragic. He describes one especially cold partner as “reptilian” and “not what society can call ‘human’ ”; another had two adult sons who were so hyper-violent that they would be comical if they weren’t so terrifying. It will be difficult for anyone to read this entire memoir and not find themselves surprised on multiple occasions. So many elements of King’s recollections—particularly about his disastrous cohabitations—make this a truly unpredictable tale.
A strikingly honest, if occasionally repetitious, look at a unique life.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5442-6443-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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