An inspiring, if overly cheerful, memoir.
A husband recounts his wife’s struggle with—and triumph over—cancer.
In 2003, while debut author Corner’s wife, Pam, was taking a walk with her future sister-in-law, she started to experience some discomfort in her chest and shortness of breath. She didn’t make much of it at first, but a trip to a doctor brought grim news: she had stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Armed with a battery of test results, the author and his wife went in search of a suitable physician, but initially, everyone they consulted delivered a bleak prognosis, bereft of hope. Then they found Dr. Sucai Bi, who, after ordering a bone marrow extraction, came up with a plan: chemotherapy, radiation, and a stem-cell transplant. Both the author and his wife took a hands-on approach to the medical process and became impressively knowledgeable about the human body—something that was a source of both pain and wonderment to them. Predictably, the aggressive treatments had a withering effect on Pam’s body; she lost weight, her hair, and her natural vivaciousness. But she never surrendered her optimism and fought relentlessly toward an ultimate recovery. Nearly six months later, Pam finally received an infusion of stem cells—a day that she now considers a symbol of renewal and that she now speaks of as a second birthday. After completing her remaining treatments, she regained her former robustness, and, in 2005, she was able to finish the New York City Marathon. The author’s remembrance is inarguably an inspiring one—despite daunting odds, the couple remained remarkably sanguine about their prospects. Corner’s prose, however, can be overwritten and sentimental at times (“Our heroine successfully traverses the vastness of the unknown as she meets the challenge of a lifetime”), and his accounts of exchanges with his three young daughters are cloyingly sweet. Indeed, the book’s unremitting hopefulness is simultaneously a strength and a weakness. There also isn’t much reflection of a darker nature—the text only sparingly confronts the issue of Pam’s mortality, for example—and as a result, this brief recollection may not resonate strongly with many other cancer survivors.
An inspiring, if overly cheerful, memoir.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7491-0
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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