A tender memoir about love, life and going blind.
The story of a woman navigating the life-changing effects of a degenerative disease.
Learning she had a disease that would eventually destroy her eyesight, leaving her permanently blind, was the last thing Kear expected to hear at the age of 19 when she went in for an eye exam. When the doctor told her she had maybe 10 years of sight left, the author pushed the thought of being blind to the back of her mind and decided to live life to the fullest. A stint in a circus school, several bit parts in plays and numerous one-night stands helped Kear avoid her reality: that her peripheral vision was gone, her line of sight restricted to a narrow tunnel, and her ability to see at night finished. Bouncing from New York City to California and back, Kear surged forward, hiding her increasing disability from her family and friends. This resulted in some hilarious and almost disastrous incidents, which she covered with a sassy sense of humor and long-sleeved shirts, pants and scarves to hide any bruises from having run into objects. Despite the difficulties of losing her eyesight, Kear fell in love, married and embarked on the oftentimes-difficult task, even for sighted people, of having children. The author narrates her story with frankness and humor as she relays humiliating moments such as crashing into the glass door at Starbucks, spilling coffee all over herself, or losing her daughter on the playground, only to discover she was right next to her the whole time. After a dozen years of fighting this losing battle, Kear finally acquiesced, accepted the inevitable and reached out for help. Her story is spunky and full of a zest for life that will open the eyes of readers to the little joys of the world.
A tender memoir about love, life and going blind.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02656-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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