Following a head injury, Bolzan, a former NFL player and successful executive, lost all recollection of his past life. His memoir traces his frightening struggle back from feeling completely lost and alone to building a new life with his family.
After slipping in his office restroom, the author suffered a concussion and had no recollection of who he might be, nor that the attractive woman at his bedside was his wife and the teenagers beside her, his children. His doctors advised him that his memory should return in a couple of weeks, but it didn’t happen. He also suffered from debilitating headaches, severe depression and a short attention span. He lost part of his vision in one eye, had trouble retaining new information and understanding abstract concepts. Bolzan struggled to support his family and keep his business running, finally realizing it was impossible: “I wanted to scream, ‘I’m not okay, and I’m scared!’ ” Despite what his doctors said, the author constantly battled his panic and feelings of isolation. The author constantly prodded his family for clues about his past life and personality; occasionally, what they told him caused embarrassment. With the help of his wife and daughter, the author slowly ventured back into the world, first on short neighborhood excursions to the grocery store. Bolzan began relating to his family in new ways. During an Internet search, the author located the Brain Injury Association of Arizona, and he soon began reaching out to others to share his story. While tugging at your heart, this courageous recovery narrative should also be a useful reference for professionals working with individuals suffering from brain injuries.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202547-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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