A clear and concise memoir of introspection, though Cohen’s journalistic approach may not provide abundant hope for readers.
A longtime multiple sclerosis patient seeks the meaning of hope.
For four decades, award-winning journalist Cohen (Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope, 2008, etc.) has lived with multiple sclerosis, a condition shared by his father and grandmother that has left him legally blind and with impaired movement. Through the years, the author has found many ways to cope with his condition (not to mention with two bouts of cancer), but he rarely thought of himself as having “hope.” An invitation to participate in stem cell research changed that. Throughout the book, Cohen touches on a variety of important themes, including how to live with chronic health conditions and the advancement of genetic treatments for such conditions. However, it is mainly a retelling of his own story, a means for catharsis. The author interviewed his children about their memories of him during their childhoods, during which he was prone to intense anger. The lack of any meaningful treatments for MS, as well as the lack of caring physicians, left Cohen with little to anticipate aside from a slowly degrading body. Meeting Dr. Saud Sadiq, however, forced him to look at his future anew. A pioneer in stem cell research for MS and a physician intensely committed to his patients, Sadiq allowed Cohen to experience not only hope for his own condition, but also encouragement that his suffering had not been in vain, that his treatment might lead the way to help for others. A committed nonbeliever, Cohen makes it clear that while many find hope in God—in one form or another—he does not. “For me, belief in the power of hope is linked to belief in the self.” Moreover, ties of family and friendship give people the very reason to hope. “Hope is a gift from us to us,” writes the author.
A clear and concise memoir of introspection, though Cohen’s journalistic approach may not provide abundant hope for readers.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-57525-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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