An inspiring story of love, loss and the ravages of aging.
Novelist MacEnulty (Picara, 2009, etc.) shares the experience of becoming her 86-year-old mother's caretaker in 2004—a time she describes as “gut wrenching, sometimes grief-filled” but also unexpectedly “rewarding and soul stretching.”
Her mother, a talented professional musician and composer, had moved to North Carolina where she lived alone. She worked until she was 82, when increasing disability, the result of a failed spinal operation, left her virtually homebound and in constant pain. The author writes that although retrospectively she can date the process of her mother's aging, at the time it was masked by her upbeat personality and the fact that until 2002, she was living in Florida. When it became obvious that her mother could no longer manage alone, MacEnulty took her into her own family, but this proved to be an untenable situation because of her mother's increasing disorientation and distraught behavior. While her two older brothers provided moral support and some financial assistance, the primary burden of her mother's care fell on the author. She placed her in an assisted-living facility and cared for her there on a daily basis, to the detriment of her own family—a situation that led to the disintegration of her marriage. MacEnulty writes that while she began this book in order to document the financial and emotional burden of providing for the elderly, it soon morphed into a memoir about her relationship to her mother as a younger woman who “possess[ed] a wide-ranging intelligence [and] was kind, generous, fun, and extraordinarily talented.” In 2010, she returned with her mother to Florida for a triumphant visit, to attend the performance of a requiem mass that she had composed.
An inspiring story of love, loss and the ravages of aging.Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55861-701-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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