A sharp awakening to all those who imagine that Alzheimer’s sufferers remain blissfully unaware of what’s happening to them.
A sequel to Losing My Mind (2002) continues the author’s poignant account of living with a disease that destroys memory and, with it, life’s meaning.
DeBaggio, a former journalist and herb-grower, weaves together his recollections of his past life, his observations about the present, and his fears for the future. The larger part of the present work recounts his efforts to start a small garden business. In his backyard stands an empty greenhouse that is now both his repository of memories and his personal memorial. With his long-term memory battered but still intact, he recounts how it came to be there and why it’s now empty. DeBaggio’s picture of the changing face of Arlington, Virginia, where he has lived for decades, and especially of his neighborhood and his street, is fresh and clear. Along the way there are short, almost haiku-like fragments revealing his internal world (“A shadow as thin as a slice of tomorrow follows me around. It is the memory of yesterday”) and his observations of the external (“A woman with smoky skin huddles against the cold wind as the sun comes up on a Tuesday morning”). Sad excerpts from his letters and bleak quotes from Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Patchen, et al., dot the text, all without comment and needing none. By the end, his competencies are failing, his fear level has ratcheted up—but so has his acceptance level, and thoughts of death are frequent. DeBaggio makes agonizingly clear that experiencing the loss of one’s mind is painful and frightening.
A sharp awakening to all those who imagine that Alzheimer’s sufferers remain blissfully unaware of what’s happening to them.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5003-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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