A fine and heartfelt memoir from an author hopeful in his determination to endure against the odds: “What remains is desire.”
Affecting memoir by Irish filmmaker/writer Fitzmaurice on living under the death sentence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“I frighten you. I am a totem of fear. Sickness, madness, death. I am a touchstone to be avoided.” Ireland’s No. 1 bestseller on its 2014 release, the author’s unblinking look at his life and the devastating illness that overwhelmed him charts a familiar arc of surprise and sorrow, resolution and helplessness. The narrative moves swiftly. We’re just a few pages in when Fitzmaurice, having just learned that one of his films will be screened at Sundance, notices that his foot is flopping. Having injured it while climbing in the Himalayas the year before, he went to buy a pair of running shoes for support only to see the widening eyes of the shoe salesman become “a twinge in my stomach.” Deeply in love with his wife and with a small army of children in the house and on the way (“my willy works. It’s that simple”), he was given only three or four years to live. The disease notwithstanding, he protests, “I am about the healthiest person with ALS you are ever likely to meet.” That the disease follows its own logic did not dissuade him from deciding to live with a ventilator and with technology that allows him to communicate. Though the writing is occasionally facile—“we are orphans of the universe. Our species is defined by asking questions, out into the dark, without anyone to guide us except each other”—Fitzmaurice communicates well, making his own case and advocating for the right of the afflicted to make their own choices in how they will live and die.
A fine and heartfelt memoir from an author hopeful in his determination to endure against the odds: “What remains is desire.”Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-328-91671-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
