A syrupy yet heartwarming tale of roiling emotions and the power of love.
A stirring account of New York Yankees star Posada's family's struggle with their child's difficult condition, craniosynostosis.
This is a lovely story of terrible circumstance, told by Jorge and his wife, Laura, and the authors bring a respectable polish to their honest storytelling, despite some heavy-handed sentiment and a few goofy puns: “I knew deep down that if I played my cards right, she could very well become the greatest catch of my life.” Their son Jorge Jr. came as a bit of a surprise, and the immediacy of his medical condition—a life-threatening skull deformity—hit the authors hard. In alternating voices, the Posadas write with a natural economy and immediacy of emotion: “How could I not imagine that he was going to die? It crossed my mind that this might be the last time I would ever get to put my son to sleep,” writes his mother as her nine-month-old son is readied for surgery. “Was he in pain? Was he suffering? Would he always suffer?” asks his father. These were a couple of type-A achievers who had to manage their self-involvement, irritability, exhaustion, depression and embarrassment, and find a way to patience, perseverance, fortitude and confidence. Ultimately, all those traditional virtues paid dividends. The Posadas turned their suffering into initiative, starting an advocacy group to bring help to those with craniosynostosis, funding research and offering critical support to families.
A syrupy yet heartwarming tale of roiling emotions and the power of love.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0308-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
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
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