A moving testimonial to the transformative power of human compassion and connection amid catastrophe.
A survivor of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing attacks reflects on the trio of fearless individuals who saved her life and rescued countless others.
Sdoia passionately recalls the events leading up to and immediately following the terrorist attack, a day that “went from being pure celebration to desperate survival.” She shares her history as a family girl drawn away to California for several years but always returning home to Massachusetts to friends and family, and she describes herself as having a “complicated relationship with running.” Yet standing on the sidelines of the Boston Marathon that day, the seasoned 5K runner became so energized and rejuvenated by the runners’ excitement and sheer determination, she promised herself to enter the race the following year. After her right foot was blown off by one of two pressure-cooker bombs planted near the finish line, she was immediately tended to by Northeastern University student Shores Salter, Boston police officer Shana Cottone, and a nearby physician, all who assisted in tying a makeshift tourniquet around her mutilated leg. She was raced to the hospital by firefighter Mike Materia, who stayed with her throughout the entire ordeal and beyond. With her leg medically amputated just above the knee, the author’s agonizing physical and psychological recovery began. She also established a significant connection with Materia, who stayed in constant contact as she was rehabilitated back to health, and they became swept into an enduring romantic relationship. Each of the three who participated in Sdoia’s valiant rescue is fondly profiled, showing his or her personality as an honest, hardworking, and unexpectedly heroic Bostonian. The author considers all three as “family,” and her book spins the events of that tragic afternoon into a tapestry of solidarity, unity, love, and selfless humanity. Aside from instances of repetitiveness, the book is heartfelt and honest. Though the bombers “took away that day,” she writes, “we’re taking it back.”
A moving testimonial to the transformative power of human compassion and connection amid catastrophe.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-700-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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