A beacon of a book amid a sea of darkness.
Memoir meets journalistic activism in this examination of dementia as an epidemic in an era of greater longevity.
Though award-winning British journalist Gerrard has published novels under her own name (The Twilight Hour, 2014, etc.), she has reached a wider readership as half of the husband-and-wife duo who write a mystery series as Nicci French. Fans and newcomers alike will find this memoir revelatory and moving, as the author recounts her experience with her late father’s dementia, which inspired her to co-found the advocacy group John’s Campaign. “To explore dementia’s meaning and its excruciating losses,” she writes, “is to think about how far we as a society and as individuals are responsible for the suffering of others: what we owe each other, what we care about, what matters in the world we all share. Who matters.” The most personal parts of her inquiry carry both an emotional and a philosophical charge. As more people live longer, more will suffer from dementia, a disease that affects not only the patient, but friends and families, the medical profession, the economy, and society as a whole. She reaches beyond her own experience for interviews with others facing similar challenges. Though presenting each as a continuous case history, she weaves multiple threads throughout the narrative, along with expert testimony and statistical support. Some readers may find it difficult to keep the specifics straight as Gerrard switches among families dealing with the disease, but the range of experiences and perspectives remains illuminating. The more the author seems like a journalistic observer, taking notes from the sidelines, the flatter the tone, though the best writing is indelible: “When did my father’s dementia begin? We don’t know. We’ll never be able to put a finger on the danger spot: there. Like fog that streaks up stealthily, imperceptibly, until the foghorn booms and suddenly there are dark shapes looming at you out of shrouded darkness—you think you’ll notice it, but often you don’t. Then you can’t.”
A beacon of a book amid a sea of darkness.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52196-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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