A tender memoir that combines the deep sadness of loss with the joys of parenthood even under incredibly trying...
Within hours of giving birth, Liz Logelin died of a pulmonary blood clot, leaving her husband Matt as sole caretaker of their daughter Madeline.
From their first meeting in 1996, they experienced a story-book romance and were blessed with close family and friends, good jobs and a new home. With their first child on the way, things began to fall apart when Liz became so nauseated that she couldn't keep food down and began to lose weight. This affected their unborn child, who was being starved of nutrients. There were other complications, as well. As a result, Liz went on bed rest and was then hospitalized, and the premature delivery of the baby seven weeks before its due date became necessary. Faced with a double calamity—his wife's death and a premature infant to care for—Matt wondered how he could manage. While friends and family rallied around him and his employer gave him generous paid leave of absence, he was completely unprepared for the responsibilities of single-parenthood. The author writes movingly of how his grief mingled with joy as his tiny infant thrived under his care and he began to piece his life back together. Seven months later, with Maddy in day care, he returned to work. Gradually, through the Internet, he met and bonded with others in similar circumstances, and he continued to maintain close ties with his friends and relatives.
A tender memoir that combines the deep sadness of loss with the joys of parenthood even under incredibly trying circumstances.Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-56430-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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