A testament to the restorative power of empathy and the unique gift of understanding that women can bring to each other.
A mother explores her grief and finds strength in a group of women whose children have all been diagnosed with HIV.
In 1987, at the age of 31, Loebl’s son David told her that he was HIV-positive. The author, who immigrated to the United States after World War II, had only just begun to address her fears and accept her son’s homosexuality. Upon the diagnosis, however, she immediately put her questioning aside and devoted herself to David’s care. His exuberant young friends welcomed her as one of the rare supportive parents in their community, and Loebl found independence in her frequent trips from New York to visit David in San Francisco. But caring for an adult son is a delicate ordeal, and Loebl was wary of suffocating him. In a rich exploration of the competing priorities of motherhood, Loebl recalls the need to be strong for David while simultaneously hiding her own depression. Unable to reveal her pain to David or her family, Loebl joined a support group for mothers of children with AIDS, but her relationship to the group was tinged with ambivalence. The sad stories exhausted her, as did the frequent funerals that reminded her how deceptive were David’s verve and healthful good looks. But the author ultimately found comfort in the group, sharing hope and news of treatments. Ten years after the diagnosis, with no cure in sight, she reached out to the group to prepare emotionally for David’s death. With disarmingly direct, unsentimental prose, the author makes her grief palpable, as she quietly observes her son in moments of hysteria, pleading for her late into the night; in episodes of understated resilience as he forges ahead in relationships; in work and in his love of theatre and dance. Through her nuanced analysis of the psychology of others–from her son and husband to the kaleidoscope of women in her support group–the author reveals plenty of herself as well.
A testament to the restorative power of empathy and the unique gift of understanding that women can bring to each other.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-41575-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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