A collection of personal anecdotes, case histories, and reflections notable for their Zen-like quality of absolute acceptance. Remen (Univ. of Calif., San Francisco, Medical School; The Human Patient, 1980) was once a pediatrician and is now a ``psycho-oncologist,'' counseling people with cancer. Her success in that field probably lies in her skills as a listener and her conviction that the stories friends, relatives, and patients tell about their lives are ``the way wisdom gets passed along.'' When she was a child, those stories were (and still are) often told around kitchen tables, hence the title. The stories that she retells here are drawn from her own life as a medical student and a practicing physician, and from the lives and dreams of her patients. Organized into chapters that celebrate spiritual and emotional breakthroughs, the tales are funny, moving, enlightening, and often based on seemingly inconsequential moments. For instance, Remen uses the sight of blades of grass growing through a concrete sidewalk to demonstrate that, despite natural disaster and human clumsiness, ``life is not fragile.'' Other lessons are taught by a young gang member, an air traffic controller, and the people of Fiji, as well as by Remen's grandfather. She also borrows insights from Zen teachings and from Buddhism, matching them with anecdotes from her own childhood; one of the ideas that emerges from this blend is that life is like a jigsaw puzzle, with lessons to be learned from each dark and light fragment. The simplicity and immediacy of the insights take the curse off an inclination to New Age speak. Part of Remen's work is to help sick people die, but this modest volume, very like a series of meditations, will inspire healthy lives as well. (First serial to Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, and New Age Journal; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 6, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-042-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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