A poignantly searing fusion of heartbreak and hope.
Candid, compassionate memoir of dealing simultaneously with a newborn and a mother with Alzheimer’s.
It was after the birth of her first child that Lockhart, a neurobiologist turned freelance writer, first became aware that her mother Ruthie, a retired schoolteacher, was becoming uncharacteristically forgetful and semi-incoherent, unable to recall recent telephone conversations or a sizable loan. Ruthie had always been “the capable one, the practical one, the doer,” the author recalls. When her mother’s condition developed into something more serious than just the “late midlife slump” she’d surmised, Lockhart decided to return home to California after years of living in Massachusetts. The belief that being physically closer would somehow rejuvenate Ruthie’s health was soon dashed. She continued to psychologically and physically falter, and was eventually diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease just as Lockhart gave birth to her second child. As her mother’s disease progressed, the author explored various costly nursing homes, but couldn’t bring herself to decide. Lockhart’s training as a neurobiologist saturates her narrative; she adroitly explains in scientific yet accessible terminology both the development of new neurons taking place in her newborn’s body and the “sticky plaques” clogging the once-elastic receptor cells in her mother’s brain. Wry humor occasionally seeps into her portrait of such tribulations as fruitlessly attempting to find a place at work to use a breast pump or Ruthie’s random bouts of uncontrollably impulsive behavior. Originally serialized in the online magazine Literary Mama, the memoir juxtaposes the joy and elation of raising a baby with the sad, painful task of caring for a dying parent.
A poignantly searing fusion of heartbreak and hope.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4155-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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