Extraordinary people with extraordinary experiences—all expressed in leaden prose that drags to earth a story that should...
In language most hackneyed, a mother relates her daughter’s struggle to survive pediatric HIV/AIDS and her emergence as a spokesperson for AIDS awareness.
Is there a cliché in the English language that does not appear here? People go “the extra mile,” “stay on top of everything” (or find things “spinning out of control”); they have “two strikes against them” as they find the way “out of the woods,” only to learn that something is “a double-edged sword” and that there are “no simple answers or quick fixes.” And then this whopper: “Being cooped up together 24/7 for weeks on end was no picnic.” The slothful prose, fashioned by Romanowski (who has ghosted books with Annette Funicello and psychic George Anderson, 1994 and 1991, respectively), diminishes immeasurably the effect of a most inspiring story. In 1984, Patricia Broadbent and her husband adopted Hydeia as an infant and learned in her fourth year that her many medical problems and lack of appetite were due to one thing: the HIV virus she had inherited from her birth mother, a drug addict who had surrendered Hydeia shortly after delivery. This alarming intelligence animated rather than depressed the Broadbents. They made themselves experts on the infection, battled ignorance and fear wherever they found it (from nursery schools to physicians’ offices), and became fierce advocates for their daughter—and for others suffering from the infection, especially children. The National Institutes of Health accepted Hydeia in one of their experimental treatment programs, and the Broadbents began their long, stressful, expensive, but ultimately rewarding journey. Hydeia herself became an articulate AIDS activist, met an assortment of celebrities who contributed energy and/or money to her cause and appeared on countless talk shows—and even on the podium at the GOP National Convention (1996). She contributes a few pages here, as well.
Extraordinary people with extraordinary experiences—all expressed in leaden prose that drags to earth a story that should soar.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-46314-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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