Despite a rushed ending and a difficult narrator, the book is an exact, revealing and intermittently moving portrait of a...
As an adventurous young magazine writer for Vanity Fair, Zeman traveled the globe in pursuit of compelling subjects; in this searing memoir, he turns his reporter's gaze inward.
With unflinching precision and a welcome dose of gallows humor, the author catalogues his lifelong struggle with depression and numerous attempts to combat it. When standard talk therapy in combination with various prescription drugs proved ineffective, Zeman turned to ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), the “method of last resort.” Formerly known as electroshock therapy and heavily associated in the minds of most people, including the author, with extreme physical pain and resultant loss of mental function, Zeman's friends and family were deeply skeptical of ECT. While his mood briefly improved after the initial session, he soon entered the period of madness to which the book's title refers. The author provides firsthand observations and original insights about clinical depression and its treatments, the well-documented link between creativity and mental illness and the powerlessness of friends and relatives in the face of this type of suffering. Zeman is a first-rate storyteller with a vast and glittering array of anecdotes from which to draw. He is also a narcissistic man-child whose fawning self-descriptions and the gorgeous women he loved and left may try readers’ patience. There's a fine line between employing irony for humorous effect and boasting, and Zeman often lands on the wrong side of it. As he does with his closest friends, he draws readers in with fresh, well-crafted tales of terror, anguish and occasional triumph, then drives them away again with arrogance, evasiveness and self-absorption.
Despite a rushed ending and a difficult narrator, the book is an exact, revealing and intermittently moving portrait of a talented but struggling artist.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-592-40598-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 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.
