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
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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
