An urgent, palpably emotional account of coping with extreme grief.
Wallace Stegner fellow Evans (Creative Writing/Stanford Univ.) mourns the untimely death of his wife.
The author’s wife, Katie, died horrifically at the age of 30, killed by a bear during a walk in the Carpathian Mountains near Bucharest, Romania, and the author was there to witness her death. Katie had been athletic, bright and beautiful, and she worked in public health, while her husband taught English. She and Evans had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, and during their seven years together, they lived in Chicago, Miami and Bucharest. Evans recalls their brief life as a couple in flashbacks, eschewing chronology. Though he vividly recounts the circumstances of Katie’s exceptional death, this is the author’s story, a memoir of grieving and consolation, of trying to define a young widower’s public face and private essence. “I have three soft-cover notebooks in which I wrote daily accounts of my life during that year,” he writes. “The journal is a matter of will and record. I wanted to survive grief. I feared I would lose, with time, the intensity of my reactions.” Evans takes us with him through the many elements of the tragedy and aftermath: the funeral, the family relations, the therapy, the insurance settlement and the banking arrangements. Often, the heartfelt support of family and friends was insufficient to assuage the survivor’s guilt or the wrenching pain. The emotional narrative is a study in loss, a confession and a search for meaning. The year after Katie died, the writer lived in a room in the back of the house of his sister-in-law and her family in Indiana. “My time in Indiana evolves in stages: grieving widower, live-in uncle, surrogate,” he writes. “I am less often the interloper….Vulnerable and partially present, I live in small incidents of grief that bring us together.”
An urgent, palpably emotional account of coping with extreme grief.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4952-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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