Both heartbreaking and uplifting, the book resonates on basic human and spiritual levels.
Breedlove pays tribute to her irrepressible, fun-loving younger brother, Ben Breedlove, who died from a heart condition when he was only 18 years old. Just days before his death, he posted video a video online, “This Is My Story,” which reached millions of viewers around the world with his message of faith.
Ben had only been in the world three months when his parents learned he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that causes dangerous arrhythmias. Eager to do whatever was needed to help Ben, the parents were told, “You can’t fix it.” So they lived with it and did everything they could to give their son a normal life. Though health problems often kept him out of school, Ben readily made friends with his easy smile, sense of humor and caring nature. His greatest pleasure was making videos with his friends, eventually launching an online advice program for teenagers. In writing about her brother, Ally uses a third-person perspective at odds with the personal nature of the story, but she wins readers over with the genuine, heartfelt tone. Ally and Ben’s parents, determined to allow their son to live life as fully as possible, remained vigilant without being overprotective. By the time he was a teenager, Ben’s heart problems had grown increasingly worse. Then, one day at school, he passed out. While the emergency team worked to bring him back from the brink, he experienced a dream or vision. He didn’t know what to call it, but what he saw put him at peace with death. After this traumatic event, he described his experience in his video and posed the question: “Do you believe in angels or God?” He answered, “I do.” These words comforted his family and inspired people of many nationalities and faiths.
Both heartbreaking and uplifting, the book resonates on basic human and spiritual levels.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-23964-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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