by Robert Leleux ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2012
Leleux sweeps readers from New York to Texas to rural Tennessee on a family pilgrimage—an understated work that highlights...
A memoir of Alzheimer’s during its final stages and of a family’s attempt to provide support for a spirited grandmother whose changed outlook allowed a vital relationship to move from estrangement to reconciliation.
Leleux (The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, 2008) presents a slim, dignified portrait of his grandmother JoAnn—a wisecracking yet elegant Southerner with a penchant for entertaining—and his grandfather Alfred, her lifelong advocate, focusing on the brief window after the onset of her dementia. Rather than lingering over potentially negative details that often accompany the illness, such as extreme patient behaviors or caregiver burnout, the author explores the surprisingly merciful gifts that come with losing one’s memory: the ability to forgive and forget, to delight in the everyday and to believe that “anything is possible." Leleux was not, however, “striving for optimism” so much as a healthier perspective on a condition often regarded with foreboding. As the author, his mother and his grandfather accompanied JoAnn on her flights of fancy, the rift between Leleux’s mother and her parents began to heal, and the author discovered the power of self-reflection. Episodic recollections from childhood and a lengthy digression on Leleux’s mother-in-law round out this portrait of living amid decline. The author effectively transitions between JoAnn’s earlier years and moments after her diagnosis. She emerges not only as a beloved figure, but as a larger-than-life character who was eager for the spotlight, funny, gracious, occasionally biting in her assessment of others and altogether inspired.
Leleux sweeps readers from New York to Texas to rural Tennessee on a family pilgrimage—an understated work that highlights the emotional rewards of caring for a loved one.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-62124-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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