A sad but inspiring tale of love and mourning.
A woman recounts the painful loss of two husbands to illness.
Debut author Melis’ husband of nearly 28 years, Joe, died of lung cancer, and shortly thereafter Melis’ father passed away as well. Stunned by grief, she joined a support group and sought solace in the counsel of a therapist. About two years later, she re-entered the world of dating, but her first foray was disastrous—Paul Caponigro was a peculiar combination of bland and coarse. But then she began to see John—a brilliant scientist deeply interested in wine and photography—and their relationship developed with surprising speed. John suffered from a rare form of cancer—Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia—but he’d managed it for nearly two decades and seemed robustly healthy and optimistic about a long future together. Although initially unsure of her feelings for John, Melis grew deeply close to him and finally asked him to marry her after only five months; he enthusiastically accepted. The author retired to free up time to work on her writing and to travel with her new husband—she describes their trips to Africa and France and their plans to visit the Galápagos Islands together. But John discovered bumps on his head that turned out to be tumors, and after surgery and a terrifying brush with death, he found his cancer to be ungovernable. Toward the very end, he contemplated a double suicide pact with Melis, a proposal she seemed to seriously entertain. She found an astonishingly resilient will to live, though, and rebounded yet again following John’s death. Melis’ stirring story is beautifully told, both philosophically reflective and emotionally poignant: “Joe had been like a symphony—strings, brass, wind, and percussion—largely agreeable, occasionally discordant, and always provocative. We had shared so much, and through it all, Joe had always been there for me. Without warning, the symphony had stopped, and the resulting silence was deafening. I had felt bereft.” Her account is also remarkably candid: she openly discusses her infidelity during her first marriage and sexual experimentation in her second. Despite the heartbreaking losses she endured, she manages to produce a life-affirming memoir detailing personal triumph.
A sad but inspiring tale of love and mourning.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938288-70-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Terra Nova
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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