An informative account of the various aspects of organ donation and an inspiring affirmation of the potential value of every...
How the author gave meaning to the short life of her son, who was diagnosed with anencephaly, a fatal neural defect.
Gray and her husband were jubilant to learn that they were to be the parents of identical twins, only to have their hopes dashed when a subsequent screening revealed that one of them had anencephaly and would live a few days at most. She writes poignantly of the remaining months of her pregnancy and the need to prepare for one baby joining their home while bracing themselves “for the heartbreak of losing a child at the same time.” Online, she learned about a research program being conducted at Duke University in which researchers were seeking a cause or cure for the defect by analyzing the blood of the parents and the cord blood of both twins. The Grays decided that they would give some meaning to their tragedy by participating in the program and donating the body of their infant after his death, and the author organized the logistics of preserving and transferring his remains. At the time of her pregnancy, Gray worked in marketing for the National Industries for the Severely Handicapped, managing a speaker's bureau that enlists people with disabilities to themselves become advocates. She is currently employed as director of communications for the American Association of Tissue Banks as an advocate for organ, eye, and tissue donations. Inspired by the hope of finding out how her son's brief life took on meaning, she traveled to the various institutions where his tissues have been studied by researchers. She writes movingly not only of her own experience finding out how her dead son “was contributing to the greater good,” but also of the positive emotional impact of her visits on the researchers themselves.
An informative account of the various aspects of organ donation and an inspiring affirmation of the potential value of every life, however brief.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243822-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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