A warm, unique memoir about coping with disease.
DeSousa’s debut memoir chronicles her first year living with multiple sclerosis and some of the lessons she learned along the way.
DeSousa looks to infuse humor and wit into her life-changing first year with MS. Her vivid, accessible voice is a strength of her book, and she puts a humorous spin on the debilitating disease to cope with its effects on her body. While the irreverence is a hook, it also subtly serves to demystify some of the most confusing aspects of MS, a condition still misunderstood. Explanations about the effects on muscles, cognitive function and even hearing give readers insight into some of the daily struggles of those living with MS. The humor, however, sometimes overshadows the narrative arc and structure of the book. It’s wonderful to be able to hear the author’s voice so clearly, but at times it assumes a rambling, almost too-casual quality that attempts several conversational paths without sticking to one, leaving the reader a little befuddled. Likewise, many anecdotes about DeSousa’s everyday life—working at a medical office, teaching at Sunday school, eating junk food, getting over an ex-boyfriend—can be honed and trimmed. On the whole, DeSousa is personable and engaging. For instance, in a slightly too-long section about halfway through the book, the author describes cooking a recommended vegetable dish because cookies “aren’t very healthy.” The author’s grace shines through even in quieter moments, and those qualities shape the work just as much as the humor. The final chapter advises her readers that, “It is okay to be really really mad at this obnoxious, damaging, and weird disease….But moving forward is something I insist on.”
A warm, unique memoir about coping with disease.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989972369
Page Count: 240
Publisher: SDP Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2014
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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