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EVER BY MY SIDE

A MEMOIR IN EIGHT ACTS PETS

A tender tribute to the author’s father, sure to please fans of Trout’s previous two pet-focused books.

Veterinarian surgeon Trout (Love Is the Best Medicine, 2009, etc.) writes about his father and the pets they shared in this loving, humorous memoir.

Growing up in a working-class British suburb, the author longed for a dog of his own. With encouragement from his frequently unemployed father, he lobbied his mother, who at first adamantly opposed adding another mouth to the family. Success came after a wave of neighborhood break-ins demonstrated the advantages of a having a watch dog at home. So Patch, a part–German shepherd puppy, joined the family. Despite Trout’s love for Patch, the dog primarily bonded with his father. The author describes his initial jealousy: “I was the friend who got him the introduction and now I was the one getting dumped.” Patch proved to be rambunctious and difficult to control but much beloved. Trips to the vet were especially difficult, even though the doctor took Patch’s excitability in stride. Trout’s father settled into a career as an electrician, but he always desired a country life. The author discovered that along with his love of animals, he had a predilection for science. When he expressed an interest in possibly becoming a veterinarian, his father was so enthusiastic that he began flooding the house with books by James Herriot and TV episodes of All Creatures Great and Small. Stranger still, his father began adopting the fictional Herriot’s mannerisms, dress and Yorkshire way of speech. A succession of family pets followed Patch, and Trout embarked on the challenging path of becoming a veterinary surgeon, eventually relocating to the United States, where he married and started his own family. Sadly, he began to realize that although he always had his father's unconditional support, he was disappointed that his son did not follow in the footsteps of Herriot and become a country veterinarian.

A tender tribute to the author’s father, sure to please fans of Trout’s previous two pet-focused books.

Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-7679-3200-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Broadway

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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