A wise and elegiac tribute to a mother, a writer, and a brave spirit, from a loving but clear-eyed daughter.
A moving but frank account of the last year of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life, by her daughter, that poignantly details an often difficult relationship between a loving parent and her now-adult child.
Like all journals, this is as much a record of emotions as events. Lindbergh (Under a Wing, 1998, etc.) begins with the summer of 1999 when it was apparent that 93-year-old Anne Morrow Lindbergh, ill with pneumonia, was too frail to live in her own home in Connecticut, and needed to move to her cottage on her daughter’s Vermont farm. Around-the-clock caregivers keep her comfortable and relieve the author of much of the physical burden, but she still must contend with the slow dying of all that her mother was, and meant, an emotional weight almost as wearing in its reality and its implications. Her mother, whose great gift was her ability to use language, now seldom spoke. She read a great deal, often seemed restless, and talked of wanting to go home, but could not define, after a lifetime of living in many places, what particular home she meant. The author notes the guilt all children feel as their parents age, not because, “we have not done our best for them but because we have. We cannot keep them alive . . . there is nothing we can do about it.” As she records her reactions and her mother’s continuing decline, she also recalls her childhood, her famous father, and her relations with her siblings and her own children. But at the heart of her journal is the relationship with her mother, who so comforted her when her first son died young, and who shared her delight in writing. Despite her failing health and her retreat into almost total silence, Anne Morrow lingered until February of this year.
A wise and elegiac tribute to a mother, a writer, and a brave spirit, from a loving but clear-eyed daughter.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0313-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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