An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery.
How the author and his family overcame the loss of a child.
When his 8-year-old son Owen accidentally drowned on a family rafting trip, Gerson (French Studies/New York Univ.), his wife, Alison, and remaining son, Julian, were as shocked as they were grief-stricken. Owen’s death, writes the author, was “at once a ripple in the flow of everyday life and a disruption of the entire universe.” Desperate to understand his loss, Gerson went deep inside himself and began to write while Alison externalized her grief through exercise. As he imagined Owen growing up and old, the author obsessively revisited the day of Owen’s death and the hours that preceded it, carefully skirting around the actual incident itself. The strain of his son’s death eventually caused Gerson to develop a rash and then other symptoms of physical breakdown, including bowel irritation, a hernia, prostatitis, and tinnitus. The loss affected Gerson’s relationship to Alison as well as the relationships each had to their respective parents. Needing comfort, it was as though they had “bec[o]me children again.” Yet it also brought Gerson closer to his own history as the son of an American-born Jewish man whose own family escaped the Holocaust. A trip to Belarus with his father, Berl, and son made Gerson realize that “those who had failed to save loved ones did not necessarily live in shame or guilt.” This epiphany helped him to not only look directly at Owen’s death, but also see that he was not to blame for it. Berl’s own “good death” not long afterward released Gerson from his past, which allowed him to share the words he had penned about Owen with Alison and relive the civil lawsuit that followed the tragedy. Keenly observed and deeply felt, this book is not only a powerful reflection on grief and loss, but also an intimately textured history of fathers and sons.
An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90669-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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