The mind-body problem West (Love's Mansion, 1992, etc.) confronts in this pugnacious memoir owes more to Hippocrates than to Descartes. Physical deterioration inspires meditations on health care, aging, and death that orbit a central dilemma: intellectual inquiry in conflict with the Kierkegaardian leap of faith that modern medicine requires of patients. A migraineur since childhood, West suffers a succession of ailments—stroke, diabetes, heart trouble—that lead to Intensive Care and, eventually, a pacemaker. His convalescence is overseen by Dr. Obeid, an enlightened cardiologist who reads his patient's books and answers his hard questions with paternal forbearance. Not all of West's doctors are so accommodating. Most resent his appropriation of medical slang, preferring a ``secret society smugness'' that discounts the patient's need to influence his treatment; responding to a complaint, one doctor informs West that hospitals don't exist for the convenience of patients. West (who quotes the Physician's Desk Reference, Frankenstein, Wordsworth, and Milton with equal felicity) can be demanding. Mostly, though, his commonsense prescriptions are obvious: The last thing a hypersensitive patient needs is a confrontation with doctors to raise his blood pressure further. But physicians rarely see patients as sentient beings, West argues, and his insistence on being treated as such gives the memoir its endearing feistiness and dignity. It's no coincidence that the combativeness that makes him a testy patient also heightens his will to survive. Survival—and the compromises one makes for its sake—are of major concern here. So, too, is language. Unable to reason his way to health, West takes pleasure in wordplay (mining the etymology of medical terms and drug names) and proves—in his analysis of the careless, ambiguous language that often undermines living wills—that precision of thought and expression can mean, literally, the difference between life and death. West indulges a bit of ``secret society'' elitism of his own with his frequent literary fireworks but demonstrates that, even in sickness, the mind is restless and indomitable.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-84956-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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