“I was the luckiest woman in the world,” insists the author in this revelatory and deeply moving memoir that clearly shows...
From pity to empowerment, a woman who contracted polio as a baby illuminates her personal changes in attitude and accomplishment amid sweeping societal changes in rights for the disabled.
As a child in Sicily, LaSpina struggled with her family to understand the disease. Was it a sign of the family’s sin, and was she the cross they had to bear? Was it her destiny? If so, was she destined to be single and celibate? A nun or an old maid? Her father didn’t think so; he moved the family to America, hoping that better medical care would provide a miracle cure. The author found herself in hospitals with other children who had mobility issues and other diseases. She underwent a series of painful surgeries, intending to be able to walk and leave behind the wheelchair she had learned to love. Ultimately, she did walk, with braces and crutches, but she kept falling, breaking bones and complicating her life. She wanted to please her father, who had focused the family’s life and resources on enabling her to walk. Yet she was also becoming part of an activist movement that stressed acceptance and independence. Once feeling so insular, alone, and helpless, LaSpina, who created and taught courses in disability studies at the New School, began to feel “good to belong, to be part of something. I wasn’t sure what that something was, but I knew I wanted to be part of it.” Her memoir encompasses activism, civil disobedience, and legislation that would help move disability from the realm of disease requiring treatment (and eliciting pity) to respect, acceptance, and equal protection under the law. The author also addresses sexuality and romance, showing how she discovered that her life need not be limited as it once seemed destined to be.
“I was the luckiest woman in the world,” insists the author in this revelatory and deeply moving memoir that clearly shows how and why she came to feel that way.Pub Date: July 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61332-099-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New Village Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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