A piercing cry from the heart, a resounding call for reform — and that rare thing: a unique book. Wharton (Last Lovers, 1991, etc.) reports on events leading up to and away from the death of his daughter under horrific and, many will insist, unnecessary circumstances. On August 3, 1988, Kathleen Wharton Woodman was driving on Interstate 5 in Oregon with her husband, Bert, at the wheel and their daughters, Dayiel and Mia, strapped in their car seats. Suddenly the four were heading into billows of black smoke. Next minute they were dead, incinerated as the result of a highway pile-up. The smoke came from nearby fields where seed farmer Paul Thompkins was executing an annual activity, field burning. Wharton, immeasurably grieved and outraged, divides his account into three parts. The first, "Kate," is actually fiction, Wharton's idea of how his likeable, practical daughter might have told the story of her life. It's a simple life, full and uneventful in the way many lives are. In the second section, "Will," Wharton describes how he and his family handled their mourning, how they traveled to Oregon, where Will became convinced that field burning is not the only way to sanitize land. Mounting a campaign to fight the widespread practice, Wharton gathered what evidence he could, including pictures of the deceased that he had taken at the mortuary. "This first one is the one who burned the least, the little baby, Mia," the mortician says at the outset of the grisly, memorable scene. "Settlement," the book's third part, details how Wharton tried to force the kind of public trial that would expose the cruel arbitrariness of field burning. But authorities, including his own lawyers, pressed for a settlement to which he finally, frustratedly succumbed. Wharton's ordeal is not easy reading, but his persistence in assailing the woeful cause for it is highly admirable.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55704-223-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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