by Robert Orfali ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2011
A lucid, powerful argument for letting dying patients go gentle into that good night.
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Orfali’s compelling manifesto explores the fraught ethics and surprisingly convenient practical details of physician-assisted dying.
In his Grieving a Soulmate, the author recounted the painful closing hours of his wife’s battle with cancer, an experience that inspired this call for voluntary euthanasia as a merciful way of ending the suffering of terminal patients. Here, Orfali surveys the typical American modes of dying and finds them wanting. Death in a hospital intensive care unit, he writes, is “a high-tech nightmare,” and while hospice care is more humane, it too relies on a kind of passive or slow euthanasia—deep sedation and the withholding of life support, food and water—that he finds full of pitfalls. Orfali prefers Oregon’s system of legal euthanasia by self-administered overdose of the barbiturate Nembutal in liquid form—a drug widely used by veterinarians to put down pets—that, he contends, quickly and reliably induces unconsciousness and a peaceful death. He argues that this is “the ultimate form of existential self-empowerment”—a painless, dignified demise on the patient’s own terms and timetable. Orfali presents a knowledgeable and spirited defense of euthanasia against its detractors: studies of assisted dying in Oregon, the Netherlands and Switzerland, he notes, show no slippery slope toward mass euthanasia nor any evidence that the elderly, the disabled or the poor are being pressured into suicide; and “pro-life vitalists” who insist that life should be prolonged no matter the circumstances, he argues, end up imposing unbearable pain on others in the name of an abstract religious moralism. Orfali approaches this agonizing subject with common sense informed by extensive research and an acute sensitivity to the dilemmas faced by dying patients and their families and doctors. The result is a thought-provoking contribution to the debate over this explosive issue.
A lucid, powerful argument for letting dying patients go gentle into that good night.Pub Date: April 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1936780181
Page Count: 253
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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