A mix of plangent emotion and deep insights into end-of-life medicine, delivered in limpid, moving prose.
A doctor copes with the anguish of dying children in this searching medical memoir.
Macauley, a pediatrician and Episcopalian priest at the University of Vermont and the Oregon Health and Sciences University, recounts his career in pediatric palliative care, a specialty that focuses on easing the suffering of children with fatal illnesses. His experiences have yielded many heartbreaking—and sometimes infuriating—case studies. They include accounts of premature triplets for whom the parents demanded resuscitations even though, born after 22 weeks’ gestation, the babies had no chance of surviving; 8-year-old Tony, whose fundamentalist Christian mother refused pain meds for his excruciatingly painful treatment of Guillain-Barré Syndrome on the grounds that suffering is holy; Collin, an 18-year-old with cystic fibrosis and a punk rock band who almost beat the odds with a successful lung transplant, until immunosuppressive drugs made him prey to viruses that caused terminal cancer; and Kharma, a 12-year-old girl who seemed in perfect health until a rare cancer erupted and killed her in a few weeks. There’s also the occasional miracle, like Cora, born with a genetic disorder called trisomy 18 that was considered “incompatible with life”; rejecting doctors’ recommendations that she let the infant die, her mother Joy insisted that Cora get heart surgery and other treatments, and Cora is still going strong at age 11. Macauley weaves in his own story of surviving childhood molestation, which gave him “soul calluses” that insulated him from others’ suffering; ultimately, he notes, his patients helped renew his capacity to feel pain without letting it crush him. He also probes the contentious hospital politics surrounding pediatric palliative care (the author earned a reputation for siding with desperate parents instead of pressuring them to sign do-not-resuscitate orders).
Macauley infuses these vivid scenes from a doctor’s life with knotty reflections on the moral conundrums they pose. He grapples with the mystery of why God permits suffering and with the agonizing tension between parents’ demands for heroic interventions and the pointless suffering they can cause. The author paints a complex, conflicted, deeply human portrait of his practice, probing the confusion and awkwardness that often lie beneath his professional front of authoritative expertise, which he conveys in subtle, restrained prose: “I returned to Mary’s room, more because I’d promised I would than because I knew what to do or say. The creases around Tom’s eyes had deepened, almost as if he’d aged in the past few minutes in a desperate attempt to accelerate time so that his children would be old enough to survive.” There are passages here of nearly unbearable sorrow expressed in layers of evocative, haunting details: “Only minutes before, Kharma had been thrashing in her bed from a sudden spike in her pain. The nurse had given her more medication and pulled the drapes to darken the room, but nothing succeeded in calming her until Erin started singing softly: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” The result is a luminous meditation on the beauty of life, even in its most wrenching moments.
A mix of plangent emotion and deep insights into end-of-life medicine, delivered in limpid, moving prose.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781594981517
Page Count: 370
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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