Sunday, March 18, 2018

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi was an excellent and profound book by the late neurosurgeon who died from cancer in March 2015 and is survived by his wife and their young daughter.

Kalanithi grew up in a family that heavily valued education and after they moved from the Northeast to Kingman, Arizona, his mother got a college prep reading list for her children and Kalanithi at ten read the book 1984, then others such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Robinson Crusoe, The Last of the Mohicans, and Don Quixote, developing a love of literature. He attended Stanford, completing degrees in Human Biology and English Literature, and went through Medical School at Yale.

Kalanithi decided to practice neurosurgery and the book shows his interest in the counseling of a patient or loved one of a patient through horrific decisions and times, almost a pastoral role in relation to medicine. While he was about to embark on the next phase of his career, Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal cancer and in the book he notes how he returned to performing surgery, with him writing “even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”

Kalanithi and his wife Lucy decided after the diagnosis to have a child and his cancer began to resist the medications he was on some five month's after his daughter Cady born, with Kalanithi then dying three months later. The book is great reading... profound, sad, uplifting, and a well-crafted account by someone who knew that his time was short, didn't know exactly how short it would be and fought to extend his life. Kalanithi in relation to the times right after his diagnosis, quotes writer Samuel Beckett with “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Bobby Kennedy by Chris Matthews

Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit was a solid book by Chris Matthews on the United States Senator and Attorney General under his brother John F. Kennedy and who was assassinated in 1968, eighty days after announcing his run for the presidency, and five years after JFK killed in Dallas.

Matthews hosts Hardball on MSNBC and chronicles well Kennedy's life, skill at getting things done and concern for those less fortunate. It's noted how after the assassination, Kennedy's body was carried from New York to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington via train, with an estimated one million people, few well-off as Matthews put it, lining the tracks to pay their respects.

Kennedy's early political work was on behalf of his brother, starting with him serving as JFK's campaign manager in a Senate race, and continuing up to the November 1963 shooting of the President in Dallas. In their work together, Bobby was often the driving force behind things, and while Attorney General in the White House, Bobby's morals and being on the right side of history was evident, with the two of them starting what would later get signed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

After the death of his brother, Kennedy won election to the Senate in 1964, and felt compelled to run for President in 1968 due to both his opposition to the Vietnam War and view of civil rights and the under-represented. Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis the night of Martin Luther King's death is pointed to as an example of his humanity and moral compass and a fundamental idea that he put forth in his all too short presidential campaign was the important ideal that America is great, and should also be good.