A disquieting reminder of the old maxim, “The dead can’t answer back.”
An attempt to explain a friend’s baffling suicide.
Bestselling author Iris Chang was just 36 when she committed suicide—a fact which, perhaps even more than most suicides, surprised everyone who knew her. In the years prior to her death, Chang had written three highly acclaimed books, including 1997’s The Rape of Nanking, a story of Japanese atrocities in China which reopened heated dialogue around the world. She was happily married with a charming two-year-old son, and was, says Kamen, “the most envied, and enviable, person I knew. She achieved success, by all possible external measures, to the extreme and to an almost farcical extent…She was beautiful. She was thin.” Yet on November 9, 2004, Chang drove to a remote road, parked her car and shot herself in the head. Kamen (All in my Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache, 2005, etc.), who met Chang when the two were in college, when Chang was already an ambitious young reporter, was first driven to write an article about Chang’s death for Salon.com, and then, faced with waves of e-mails from readers asking the same questions she had about the death, the book. “I wondered if this was amoral, exploiting a friend’s tragic case for a book and possibly upsetting her grieving family,” she writes. “With some sensitivity, maybe I could be only minimally amoral.” To that end, the author is partially successful. Kamen dutifully delves into the larger issues of suicide and mental illness in Asian-American communities, and into the peculiar immigrant drive to succeed that seized Chang so forcefully at such a young age. She also brutally reports each way she feels that she might have betrayed her friend—including a devastating passage in which Kamen recounts ignoring Chang’s phone calls in the days prior to her suicide, and then reveals that one of the points in Chang’s “twenty-point plan to get Iris well” had been to “call friends—as a source of support.” Kamen draws an intriguing portrait of an enormously ambitious woman who appears to have worked very hard to craft her own image, and Chang herself haunts the book in the form of italicized letters and e-mails to friends and family. Yet the sense of invading a troubled woman’s privacy is hard to escape.
A disquieting reminder of the old maxim, “The dead can’t answer back.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-306-81466-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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