Stoked by the author’s boundless, good-natured charm, his story pops with an effervescent sense of humor that never falters.
Think you’ve got it rough? Hemophiliac Decker contracted hepatitis B at four, was given an HIV-positive diagnosis at 11—and he can still crack a smile.
One in every 10,000 males is born with hemophilia, a deficiency in the blood-clotting protein that often, as in the author’s case, turns routine events like nosebleeds into life-threatening occasions. Aside from fun times shoplifting Penthouse with friends and covertly watching porno movies, Decker’s childhood in Waynesboro, Va., was spent battling internal hemorrhaging and liver failure while being overprotected by panicky parents desperate to shelter him from unintentional, self-inflicted injury. Even older brother Kip sympathetically imagined his demise (only because he imagined Shawn would probably “have more fun in Heaven”). But the writer, a self-proclaimed “thinblood,” adjusted quickly to his condition; by the time he was ten, the anxiety, medical treatments, ER visits and transfusions had all become routine. As a result, his heartfelt memoir is narrated with a comedic, tranquil flow not found in many accounts of tragic health conditions. Decker maintains his cool even when describing how his HIV diagnosis further complicated matters. Contracted from one of the countless blood transfusions he’d undergone, HIV provoked all the “ignorance and stigma that goes along with AIDS” in his little hometown. After his own father outed him as HIV-positive, Shawn became a tortured pariah, and his parents eventually separated. Softening the blow were star-struck meetings with wrestlers and alternative rock bands, puberty and a first crush. Graduating from high school, Decker developed his own website, began networking with support groups and reconnected with friends. He “put [his] virus to work” as an AIDS activist, though being a member of the community’s heterosexual minority often proved challenging. Not even a crushing AIDS diagnosis in 1999 could stop the resilient writer from marrying girlfriend Gwenn, a beauty-pageant veteran, and enjoying a full, happy life.
Stoked by the author’s boundless, good-natured charm, his story pops with an effervescent sense of humor that never falters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58542-525-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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