Eschewing literary stylishness, King tells her story with a straightforward style that makes it all the more powerful.
A toddler’s needless death in a hospital transforms her mother into an activist against medical errors.
King’s slender, often wrenching memoir recounts not one but two parental nightmares—a child’s unnecessary injury and her premature death. Josie was just 18 months old when she scalded herself in the bathtub of her family’s Baltimore home, the victim of a faulty temperature panel. Frightening as her injuries were, she was recovering from them nicely at Johns Hopkins, one of the country’s finest hospitals. Then the staff wrongly administered a drug that killed her. Her grieving parents learned that 98,000 Americans die from such medical mistakes each year. With the settlement money from Hopkins, her mother co-founded the Josie King Foundation to reduce that mortality rate by encouraging hospitals to adopt patient-safety programs. In unadorned prose, the narrative delineates the author’s evolution from despair-stricken parent to enraged avenger determined to destroy Hopkins to public activist seeking to extract some good from her child’s death. King excels in capturing small moments freighted with poignancy: her older children refusing to kiss their unconscious sister goodbye before her life support was turned off, her memories of Josie spilling juice (“I would lean over and wipe it up, never realizing how lucky I was”). The author includes a resource guide for patients, their families and health-care professionals.
Eschewing literary stylishness, King tells her story with a straightforward style that makes it all the more powerful.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1920-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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