A compassionate chronicle of a couple's last year.
A devoted husband bears witness to his wife’s final illness.
Retired Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Korda (Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory, 2017, etc.) offers a sensitive and absorbing chronicle of his wife’s death from cancer a year after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Joining a growing genre about death and dying that includes Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Korda’s memoir is both a celebration of his 45-year marriage to his “lover, companion, and best friend” and a cleareyed account of the benefits and limits of medical intervention. Until she was stricken with brain cancer, Margaret Korda seemed invulnerable: a strong, athletic woman who loved the outdoors, rode horses competitively to win five national championships, and, even at the age of 79, retained the beauty and “perfect posture of the fashion model she once had been.” Yet although she was remarkably healthy, the author discloses that she took an assortment of medications to treat depression and anxiety. “She was a perfectionist,” he writes, “hard on herself, she worried about aging, losing her looks, what she would do with herself if she had to give up riding.” Her fears made her wary of doctors, which is why, when she noticed a patch on her cheek, she covered it with makeup rather than have it removed and biopsied. By the time she agreed to remove it, the cancer had begun to spread. After the diagnosis of her brain tumor, Korda took it upon himself to find out as much as he could about the illness and treatment, devouring cancer sites on the internet and parsing medical information, hoping it would help him support Margaret’s treatment. Despite finding an excellent, caring neurosurgeon, the author “struggled with alarm and despondency as I read about what lay in store for Margaret.” He chronicles in detail her yearlong experience of surgeries, therapy, decline, and decision-making as the two learned the extent of her illness and, finally, abandoned “hope, illusions, [and] faith in miracles.”
A compassionate chronicle of a couple's last year.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-464-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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