Veteran actor Linke, best-known for the TV series CHiPS, has turned his recent one-man show and HBO drama into a poignant story of love, death, and life that goes on. Linke and his first wife, Francesca, though products of the iconoclastic 60's, were both finally ready for commitment when they met in 1976 at an L.A. party. Francesca, a musician and composer, had grown up in the East but soon moved west, where she'd become an advocate of alternative medicine and New Age beliefs—reflected in the at-home birth of the couple's first two children, both boys. Shortly after the second pregnancy, Francesca noticed a lump in her breast but sought treatment only after her mother underwent a mastectomy. The lump proved malignant and doctors advised aggressive chemotherapy, but Francesca refused. Instead, she began a lengthy, arduous quest for a natural cure based on diet and biofeedback. She visited Mexican clinics, San Francisco healers, and local practitioners—but the cancer returned. Pregnant with a third child, she refused to terminate the pregnancy as advised and gave birth at home to a daughter. But the cancer had spread to her lungs and Francesca died a year later, aged 37. This kind of story can lend itself to a wholly maudlin telling, but, to Linke's credit, he also describes candidly the reality of life and death: the relieving moments of humor in the darkest hours; his anger when, early on, Francesca seemed preoccupied with her cancer to the exclusion of everything else; and the practical difficulties of coping with death in a household with three small children. Despite a preoccupation with therapists and trends, as well as some inevitable psychobabble, Linke concentrates on the facts, his grief, and the new life that his family has built. Moving testimony from one who's been there and has found that there's a ``passage through loss to life.''
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-183-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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