Frantic and meandering in its delivery, but nonetheless a searing portrait of a family hobbled by chronic mental illness.
Poet, novelist, jazz promoter and psychotherapist Pines (Redemption, 1997, etc.) harrowingly depicts the incremental psychological breakdown of his younger brother.
Born two years apart, the boys were viewed very differently by their mother, a lawyer who preferred to concentrate on her career. “One child was workable,” their father Ben explained. “Claude was a surprise. I slipped that one in.” The author remembers looking into his baby brother’s crib and thinking, “I will never be lonely again.” Neither boy complained about tagging along while Ben performed his rounds as chief surgeon at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. After their parents’ discord escalated into a nasty divorce and Ben married a much younger woman, the brothers cowered together in solidarity and disillusionment. Though circumstances often separated them—Paul went to boarding school and following a short stint in college hit the West Coast; Claude studied abroad and briefly attended medical school in the Bronx—the brothers’ bond remained strong. But as the years progressed, they found themselves apart without communication for long periods of time. The memoir frenetically flashes between the brothers’ early days and the mid-1980s, when middle-aged Paul became reluctant to leave the increasingly agitated Claude alone while he traveled to supervise a European film adaptation of his novel. After witnessing his brother’s anxious, disheveled condition at his wedding in 1985, the author insisted that Claude be evaluated. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and the brothers’ sad, deep, codependent relationship suffered even more in the heartbreaking years to come as Claude’s psychosis was eventually accompanied by heart disease, depression and other ills. The author’s deep love for his sibling is evident on every page of this intense, painstaking chronicle.
Frantic and meandering in its delivery, but nonetheless a searing portrait of a family hobbled by chronic mental illness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-931896-34-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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