Valuable as both moral testimonial and as a medical memoir and sure to inspire heat as well as light.
“I believe that as an abortion provider I am doing God’s work”—a small but insistent red flag waved in the face of an angry political opposition.
A fundamentalist Christian as an African-American youth in the Deep South, Parker had a road-to-Damascus moment when he “became enraptured with the idea of God’s radical, egalitarian love”—though, he adds, it took him time to sort through a lifetime of biblical literalism to gauge that while Scripture might be the work of God, it is also the work of a patriarchal culture in which men call the shots. As his medical practice with plenty of elements of ministry developed, Parker became an activist in defending women’s reproductive rights up to and including abortion, which has put him squarely in the path of a well-funded, powerful anti-abortion lobby. Some of this book is polemical, some an aspirational memoir that speaks of his hard struggle to achieve a medical education in the face of institutional resistance: “Poor children…are raised without a clear sense of their own horizons,” he writes, “but rather with a systematic suppression of possibility, and a literal lack of access to pragmatic information about how successful people get things done.” The polemical portion of the program is generally modestly argued, without much in the way of inflammatory rhetoric, though Parker is fully aware of what he’s up against; the 2009 murder of his friend and colleague George Tiller, as he recounts, was a pointed reminder, but not the first. Throughout, Parker writes without irony on the depth and authenticity of his own Christian belief, which he insists allows for his medical practice, especially as a means of providing health care to underprivileged women.
Valuable as both moral testimonial and as a medical memoir and sure to inspire heat as well as light.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5112-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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