Though the chronological hopscotch makes it more like a scrapbook collection of memories than a cohesive narrative, there is...
On a remote island between Italy and Africa, a doctor does everything he can to deal with the health crises of refugees.
As the director of the only medical clinic on Lampedusa, Bartolo has seen it all. He has dealt with shipwrecks where corpses wash ashore; women pregnant from rape; babies separated from their mothers; teenagers who have no idea what their next step might be but know that they cannot return to the hell their homeland has become; and others so shaken by the trials of their exodus that they want nothing but to go back home. The doctor has seen refugees who have sold their kidneys or had other organs harvested to afford the exorbitant price of their escape. “This book is an eyewitness account, put down on paper, just as it is, black and white, without filters or embellishment,” writes co-author Tilotta. Interspersed with vignettes of tragedy and occasional hope is the doctor’s own story, how the son of island fishermen returned home with a wife and a medical degree and how he has needed to be all things to all people in the decades since. “Sometimes,” writes Bartolo, “when I am the only friendly face in front of them, patients feel as if I am no longer their doctor, but a saviour who can give them back their loved ones and reunite their families.” The author has even attempted to adopt a couple of the refugees, but perhaps his main role is as the conscience of this crisis (he was the main figure in the award-winning documentary Fire at Sea). After meeting the pope, Bartolo reflected how the two shared the understanding that “we are surrounded by invisible walls without doors, that we are fighting a hopeless battle against those who want to rid themselves of the problem by simply ignoring it.”
Though the chronological hopscotch makes it more like a scrapbook collection of memories than a cohesive narrative, there is great hope and poignancy here.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65128-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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