A welcome and heartfelt effort. We eagerly await the day when Giffords herself can more fully flesh out her story.
Moving, sometimes belabored memoir, mostly by astronaut Kelly, of Giffords' miraculous recovery after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt.
That shooting, in Tucson on Jan. 8, 2011, left Giffords with a massive head wound and severe trauma to the brain. Nonetheless, as most readers know, she bravely returned to the floor of Congress to cast her vote in the last budget battle. By summer she was well enough, Kelly reveals, that she was able to give map directions in her hometown. Yet the road to recovery has been grueling and sometimes dispiriting: “ ‘It’s awful,’ Gabby will say, and I have to agree with her.” Of the shooter himself, so much in the news, we learn little in these pages; understandably, it seems that Kelly and Giffords do not wish to accord him any space in their book. What they offer instead is a detailed, sometimes diary-like record of recovery that is nothing but inspirational, as well as an account of a marriage of two ambitious and extremely busy people. Kelly is evenhanded, but he clearly places some responsibility for his wife’s shooting on the overheated politics of the day. Her opponent was fond of hoisting automatic weapons as a sign of his toughness, while Sarah Palin placed rifle-scope targets on Giffords’ district. Even after the shooting, politics prevailed. Kelly notes that while former President George H.W. Bush, who was out of office long before Giffords entered politics, made efforts to visit her in the hospital, Speaker of the House John Boehner did not, even when he was in Houston for other reasons. Kelly’s prose—how much he owes to near–ghost writer Zaslow we do not know—is mostly workmanlike; the only spark we get is when we hear Giffords in her own words, as when she notes simply, “It was hard but I’m alive…I will get stronger. I will return.” And there are many moments that don’t seem to have a place except as filler, mostly having to do with Kelly’s experiences before the couple met.
A welcome and heartfelt effort. We eagerly await the day when Giffords herself can more fully flesh out her story.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6106-4
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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