Readably inspiring from beginning to end.
A world-famous pediatric cardiologist tells how surviving a plane crash in the high Andes led to a lifelong commitment to helping children overcome congenital heart defects.
In the fall of 1972, Canessa was a second-year medical student and member of the Uruguayan national rugby team. One afternoon, he and his rugby teammates were on a flight bound for Chile when their plane suddenly lost altitude and crashed in the Andes Mountains. (The story was the inspiration for the film Alive.) Canessa and others who survived immediately banded together into a “single organism” to face the task of tending to the injured, the dying, and the dead and making what was left of their airplane into a habitable shelter. In the midst of subzero temperatures, snowstorms, and avalanches, the survivors began to consider how they could escape from what quickly began to feel like an “icy sarcophagus.” First, the group attempted to fix their damaged plane radio to try to communicate with air rescue brigades. But after days of work, they could only hear “garbled, hissing static that never turned into words.” Forced into eating the flesh of those who had died to maintain their strength, the young men hatched a desperate plan for escape that involved Canessa and one other man climbing down the mountain to seek help. What makes this gripping narrative especially poignant is the way the author intercuts the memories of his experiences with the stories of those who lived through this ordeal with him, as well as those of the children he eventually helped as a doctor. For Canessa, emerging alive from that “sinister proving ground” high in the Andes marked a coming to consciousness of the true nature of survival and healing. By becoming a pediatric cardiologist, he could save the lives of the truly helpless and also honor all those, both living and dead, involved in the traumatic birth of his “second life.”
Readably inspiring from beginning to end.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6544-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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