A touchingly honest, pleasantly sarcastic, and thought-provoking account that focuses on resilience.
In this debut memoir, a seasoned newspaper columnist details her struggles to overcome a series of tragedies that upended her life.
Galli, born in the late 1950s, was raised in a close, loving family. The daughter of a well-respected North Carolina Baptist minister, she was the first of three children: her brother, Forrest, and sister, Rachel, quickly followed. The family ate, played, and prayed together. Life was orderly, predictable, and happy—until Labor Day weekend, 1978, when Forrest was killed in a water skiing accident. Galli writes: “The gaping hole in our tightly woven fivesome was too large for us to mend for each other. So we splintered, each taking a different path to heal.” This was only the first challenge to the author’s carefully designed life plans. In 1981, she married Joe: “We were two Type A’s ready to join forces to see what we could accomplish. Together. Forever.” Their first child, Brittany, was born in June 1987: “The timing was perfect, just as planned.” Things would not continue to go as expected. Of Galli’s next five pregnancies, one ended in a miscarriage and two produced special needs children. The strain of Joe’s very successful career and the child care demands that kept the author at home brought the marriage to a breaking point. In 1997, they divorced. Only nine days later, she contracted a “one-in-a-million” virus that would leave her permanently paralyzed from the waist down. In her poignant and courageous book (which includes many photos), Galli pulls no punches, as she chronicles her emotional journey through a life that had to be totally restructured. Rage, tears, frustrations, denial, and doubts spill from the pages through articulate, conversational prose. (An experienced writer, Galli has produced hundreds of columns for the Baltimore Sun.) She shares all the difficulties she faced in this book, including the intimate complexities of her new reality—bathroom complications, the dangers of unfelt skin abrasions, and mysterious pains where there are no other sensations. Acceptance was slow in coming: “Letting go of dreams was loss, just as real as the loss of the use of my legs.” But fierce determination lifts the narrative tone: “Life isn’t about what you’ve lost, but about what you’ve learned—and what you do with what you have left.”
A touchingly honest, pleasantly sarcastic, and thought-provoking account that focuses on resilience.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-220-8
Page Count: 330
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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