A frankly written debut memoir that captures all the fright of a medical calamity and the humor and grace necessary to...
A devastating diagnosis throws a writer and his family into a tailspin.
The crushing catastrophe at the core of Scalise’s memoir is a burst pituitary tumor that occurred in 2002, when the author was just 24. The author enlivens his anecdote-driven chronicle with dispatches involving his mother, a worrisome matriarch who smokes and drinks despite a congenital heart ailment; his father, who emails pornography to him in a postoperative attempt to jump-start depleted testosterone levels; and his understanding, compassionate longtime girlfriend, Loren. Scalise’s tumor, seated behind his eyes, released an increased amount of pituitary hormones into his bloodstream, which can lead to a rare condition called acromegaly, causing facial and body gigantism. In a chapter titled “Q&A,” the author discusses the protocol used by physicians to assess him for symptoms, intimately detailing the numerous adverse side effects he subsequently endured throughout the months following his neurosurgery. Excessive sweating, nerve damage, sleep deprivation—all pointed to a positive diagnosis and more agony for Scalise and his family. The author’s quirky sense of humor and crisp, hopeful worldview transform this memoir from dreary to fascinating and engaging even after the grueling particulars of his Gamma Knife cranial radiation procedures are laid bare. Adding substance to the story is the medical history of how acromegaly has altered the appearances of notable public figures like Andre the Giant, Tony Robbins, and Olympic skater Scott Hamilton. Combined with his thoughtful meditations on the nature of life’s randomly occurring catastrophes, readers are further drawn into the author’s story. There is no silver lining here, but Scalise’s narrative verve and brisk prose create a winning chronicle of illness, recovery, and “courageous defiance.”
A frankly written debut memoir that captures all the fright of a medical calamity and the humor and grace necessary to survive it.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941411-33-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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