This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
End of Watch
End of Watch. Once again, I’m sorry to say that there’s not much good to be said about this one. It’s a real downer, and I waited several weeks after I read it to write this review, because I didn’t want to ruin it for anyone. Problem is, I also don’t want to have to reread it, and unlike some other books, my head doesn’t want to hold on to it. My major issues were how irritating it was that King returned to drugging people […]
When not reading plot synopses bites you in the ass
I saw a book with a monster in the cover. I saw a book with “monster” in the title. I saw a book that was popular. And I never bothered to find out what it was about. “I should be more open”, I said. “Try new things,” I said. “Expand your horizons,” I said. Oh yeah. Read the kinds of books I never would have had I not joined this wonderful community. Which has been a largely successful modus operandi in my three years, here. Even […]
At Least the Baby Doesn’t Die
It’s a darned good thing I have cold — the kind where your eyes water and your sinuses itch — because at least I can blame my now-puffy eyes on that instead of the fact that When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, made me cry like a kid. Paul is — was — a talented neurosurgeon who found out he had cancer at the tail-end of his residency at Stanford. Because cutting on people eventually gets to be out of the question when you’re terminally […]
I finished this book, exhaled, and flipped it over to the beginning again.
Reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s spectacular memoir When Breath Becomes Air, a meditation about love, literature and science in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis was a strange experience “The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats and Stephen Crane,” Kalanithi wrote to a friend. “The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.” He was trying to be funny, using the kind of dark humor you get from people facing the unfaceable. But it also revealed Kalanithi’s tremendous ambition. He […]
Know Your Enemy
Like most people, I find pretty much everything about cancer terrifying. It doesn’t help that I’ve chosen a profession [Firefighter] that has all kinds of increased rates of cancer. Most of us at work don’t even like to talk about it because it reminds us that the unknown and uncontrollable might hit us at anytime. So you might wonder why I chose to read The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Every once in a while I like to delve […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- Next Page »