The mind-body problem West (Love's Mansion, 1992, etc.) confronts in this pugnacious memoir owes more to Hippocrates than to Descartes. Physical deterioration inspires meditations on health care, aging, and death that orbit a central dilemma: intellectual inquiry in conflict with the Kierkegaardian leap of faith that modern medicine requires of patients. A migraineur since childhood, West suffers a succession of ailments—stroke, diabetes, heart trouble—that lead to Intensive Care and, eventually, a pacemaker. His convalescence is overseen by Dr. Obeid, an enlightened cardiologist who reads his patient's books and answers his hard questions with paternal forbearance. Not all of West's doctors are so accommodating. Most resent his appropriation of medical slang, preferring a ``secret society smugness'' that discounts the patient's need to influence his treatment; responding to a complaint, one doctor informs West that hospitals don't exist for the convenience of patients. West (who quotes the Physician's Desk Reference, Frankenstein, Wordsworth, and Milton with equal felicity) can be demanding. Mostly, though, his commonsense prescriptions are obvious: The last thing a hypersensitive patient needs is a confrontation with doctors to raise his blood pressure further. But physicians rarely see patients as sentient beings, West argues, and his insistence on being treated as such gives the memoir its endearing feistiness and dignity. It's no coincidence that the combativeness that makes him a testy patient also heightens his will to survive. Survival—and the compromises one makes for its sake—are of major concern here. So, too, is language. Unable to reason his way to health, West takes pleasure in wordplay (mining the etymology of medical terms and drug names) and proves—in his analysis of the careless, ambiguous language that often undermines living wills—that precision of thought and expression can mean, literally, the difference between life and death. West indulges a bit of ``secret society'' elitism of his own with his frequent literary fireworks but demonstrates that, even in sickness, the mind is restless and indomitable.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-84956-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
