More than a revealing picture of FDR’s polio treatment center in the years just before the arrival of vaccines that ended a...
Memoir of life at Roosevelt’s Warm Springs polio center, where the author stayed between the ages of 11 and 13.
Novelist Shreve (A Student of Living Things, 2006, etc.) draws on an unpublished novel, written when she was 18, to refresh her memory of life at that time. Her initial stay was from August to December 1950, with a second and longer stay from June 1951 to April 1952. During both stays, surgery is performed on her right leg and she undergoes months of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation for her is not simply a physical act; she believes that at Warm Springs she will transform herself from a bad girl who had caused her family trouble into a virtual angel of God. Less severely handicapped than most of the other children—her roommate is in a body cast—the lonely young Shreve is embarrassed by her relative wholeness and feels very much the outsider. She tries to fill her days with catechism lessons from a friendly priest, reading books and becoming a sort of caretaker, visiting the babies’ ward every day, delivering mail and carrying bedpans. She writes falsely cheery letters to her mother, to which her mother offers upbeat replies, neither one acknowledging true feelings and the reality of the situation. Her special friend is a half-paralyzed boy, Joey, who dreams of becoming an athlete and whom Shreve recklessly leads into a terrible accident, the story of which begins and ends this memoir. Having tried to become the epitome of goodness, she commits a reckless act that confirms her badness and swiftly brings about her departure, if not expulsion, from Warm Springs.
More than a revealing picture of FDR’s polio treatment center in the years just before the arrival of vaccines that ended a frightening, crippling disease, this is a moving portrait of a girl on the cusp of adolescence dealing with pain, guilt and loneliness.Pub Date: June 7, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-65853-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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