A mixed bag but of interest to health policy wonks and activists.
A scion of an American dynasty recounts years of addiction, mental illness, and family dysfunction—matters that, as the title suggests, are altogether too ordinary.
Kennedy, son of Ted, is probably best known today for crashing his car into a barricade in front of his workplace under the influence of medication. This memoir opens with that event, promising, “I’m never going to remember what actually happened that night in early May of 2006 when I slammed my green Mustang into the police barrier in front of the US Capitol.” The sentence is diagnostic, both mechanically and materially, of the narrative that follows: awkward, sometimes evasive, with good thoughts clunkily expressed. Why a green Mustang? That detail is less important than the multihued pills that punctuate the narrative. We sympathize with Kennedy when we learn that illnesses such as bipolar disorder fall into a category of things that members of the clan are supposed to face stoically, without making a fuss: “I grew up,” he writes, “among people who were geniuses at not talking about things.” Effectively shut out by his father as an embarrassing reminder of weakness, Kennedy squeaked by with a narrow electoral victory to become a U.S. representative, continuing a legacy of public service—and, sad to say, a history of drug and alcohol abuse. A quarter of Americans have a similar story, by Kennedy’s account. While’s there’s some special pleading involved—“My father would have been President of the United States if there had been progressive mental health treatment for him,” he insists—much of the narrative is given over to plainspoken advocacy for mental health initiatives, some enacted into law thanks to his persistent efforts. That account goes on too long, but it makes for a useful look at the politics underlying public health; to trust Kennedy’s anecdotes, it’s amazing that anything under that rubric gets done at all.
A mixed bag but of interest to health policy wonks and activists.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17332-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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