Prolific novelist and critic Sheed recounts his winning battles with polio, cancer, and what he calls ``addiction- depression'' in this lucid, gently humorous memoir. Like William Styron, Sheed (My Life as a Fan, 1993, etc.) suffered clinical depression instigated by a dependence on alcohol (and, in Sheed's case, pills). Unlike Darkness Visible, Styron's harrowing account of the descent into madness, Sheed's reckoning emphasizes recovery more than illness—the joyful daylight of health after the dark night of disease. For Sheed, a childhood- polio survivor who contends that ``suffering carries its own antidote,'' the battle royal is against addiction and depression; in comparison, cancer and polio seem mere tests of his considerable, gruff will. That will and his healthy respect for the strength ordinary mortals summon in life-threatening circumstances are severely tried by attempts to kick sleeping pills. Sheed chafes at the one-disease-fits-all absolutism and AA platitudes espoused at a Betty Fordstyle rehab center. A man of redoubtable bonhomie, he rejects the call to abandon the old, good life—a wise choice, since desire to recapture that joie de vivre (sans booze and pills) is his strongest motivation for recovering. Seeking a ``simple physical explanation'' for the deterioration of mind and body, Sheed finds only ``airy-fairy'' talk on his rounds of MDs and shrinks. The appalling ignorance and indifference he encounters from doctors (he avoids prostate surgery only after a second opinion pinpoints Prozac as the source of a bladder problem; the first doctor never bothered to ask about medication) push Sheed to fashion his own vocabulary for describing his illness. Along the way he decries the culture of victimization America embraces, replacing it with a vision of ordinary people capable of ``latent heroism.'' Sheed's plainspoken, self-deprecating memoir forges a realistic but hopeful record of addiction-depression's long arc that may well serve those suffering from it.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79215-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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