In replaying his watch over the last six years of his parents' lives as they become ever more infirm, Taylor (Ordinary Miracles, 1993; Sins of the Father, 1989, etc.) reminds us of Shakespeare's warning that ``death, a necessary end,/Will come when it will come.'' Death is easy. What's hard is dying, as we see in this saddening memoir of how Taylor faced the challenge of aging and retired parents, once skilled professionals now on a shrunken income. A nest egg dwindles; health flakes away and flies off in small pieces. While Taylor writes with great restraint, he seldom subjects himself (or us) to that intensity or terrible immediacy once so shocking in Hemingway, who saw each detail as if on the last day of his life. A married, middle-aged, freelance New York journalist, Nick has sold a book to the movies and is writing a script that somehow seems to support his endless plane trips to North Carolina, Florida, and Mexico to help his parents arrange their housekeeping and finances. Most frustrating to him is that no act of his—however sensitive and keenly thought through—really fulfills his parents' needs or brings about a sense of lasting satisfaction in him: only delayed guilt. As with trying to adjust to the minds of a pair of drunks or addicts, something's always wrong. Time after time, he must hurry back to their loving but surprised smiles as once more he lends a hand and shores up a splitting dike. Meanwhile, some of his friends go through problems much like his, so that we see a culture of middle-aged earners caring for parents stricken with Alzheimer's or worse. As one reads, and as Nick focuses on his parents, a reader can't help foreseeing infirmities of one's own. The ``necessary end'' has some horrible side effects before it comes. A heartbreaker about caring, with no easy answers.
Pub Date: March 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47102-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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