An emotionally raw and uncompromising memoir.
A British journalist and nonfiction writer’s account of how he came to uneasy terms with the accidental death of his 14-year-old son.
When Harding (The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, 2016, etc.) lost his son, Kadian, on a cycling trip, the irony seemed too cruel. Twenty-five years before, he had met his wife and Kadian’s mother while doing a charity bike ride across the United States. A dedicated journalist “too busy to be a father…too irresponsible,” he had not wanted children; but when Kadian and, later, a younger daughter were born, he fell “totally in love.” Harding remembers the death and too-brief life of his son, a “Prince Charming” of a boy who loved lizards, bicycles, and Apple electronics. He also offers a stark portrait of his own anguish. Time—along with the contented life he knew—seemed to end the moment his son died. Trying to make sense of the tragedy, Harding moves between past and present, joy and sorrow, to create a sense of the traumatic inner fracturing he experienced. Guilt further compounded his grief. Not only did he feel anger at his inability to shepherd his daughter and wife through loss. He also wrestled with the overwhelming sense that, in his role as family protector, he was to blame for his son’s death. Bewildered and struggling to cope with PTSD, Harding searched for and found a word—kampu—used by a group of Australian Aborigines to describe the parent of a dead child. Sympathy from those around him as well as the work of memorializing Kadian helped gradually assuage the author’s pain. Yet Harding realized a new truth—that his purpose would be “forever questioned, in doubt”—had come to define his “imperfect” life as a kampu. Both eloquent and heart-rending, Harding’s book is not only a grieving father’s testament of love to his dead son. It is also a reminder of the fragility of life and human relationships.
An emotionally raw and uncompromising memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06509-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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