Must Read Autobiographies - XXX

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

"I had earned the respect of my seniors, won prestigious national awards, and was fielding job offers from several major universities... I had reached the mountaintop; I could see the Promised Land."
                                         ........ Paul Kalanithi

Paul Sudhir Arul Kalanithi (1977 - 2015) was an American neurosurgeon of Indian origin. This book is his memoir on his life of saving lives as a professional doctor and of his battling with advanced lung cancer which was published in 2016 after his death.

At the age of 36, when Paul had only 15 months to go before becoming a professor of neurosurgery, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. he examines his own CT scan with his wife Lucy, also a doctor and sees his future.

In the first half of the book, Paul deals narrates his journey to becoming a doctor and saving life. In the fourth year of his medical school when, sitting in a meeting between a brain surgeon and the parents of a child with a large brain tumor, probably malignant, he decided to pursue neurology. He describes his professional challenges as a neurosurgeon elaborately. The despair he experienced as a doctor in making difficult decisions about his patients and the guilt that he felt on a wrong decision touches the heart. 

"Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose lives couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability."

"I made mistakes… The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt."

The second half of the book narrates his illness and life thereafter.

 "As a doctor, I knew not to declare “Cancer is a battle I’m going to win!” or ask, “Why me?” (Answer: why NOT me?)."

"How often had I heard a patient’s family member make similar declarations? I never knew what to say to them then, and I didn’t know what to say to my father now."

His marriage was on the rocks. But his getting diagnosed with cancer closed the rank, brought the family together and saved his marriage. They decide to have a baby. He goes back to work for a while when fresh symptoms develop. H undergoes more rounds of chemotherapy.

The neurosurgery department is satisfied that Paul has met all qualifying requirements for graduation and decide to hold his graduation celebration about fifteen days before their baby is due. On the day of the graduation ceremony when, Paul is getting dressed for it, he is struck with intense nausea and he starts vomiting. He misses his graduation ceremony. 

Their daughter, cady, is born. That gives him lots of joy, happiness and satisfaction.

"I'm ready" says he and bids goodbye before slipping off to unconsciousness. He could not complete his book. No matter, it is a life changing , must read narration.

Namaste

Prabir

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Must Read Autobiographies - XXIX

Dying to be Me: 
My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True healing

Anita Moorjani

“I believe that the greatest truths of the universe don’t lie outside, in the study of the stars and the planets. They lie deep within us, in the magnificence of our heart, mind and soul. Until we understand what is within, we can’t understand what is without. I share my story .. in the hope of touching your heart in some way and reminding you of your own magnificence” ...Anita Moorjani

It is not an autobiography in true sense. It is best call it a memoir. It focuses on less than a decade of the author's life, when she experienced a miraculous healing from cancer. This book is about healing, about spirituality and shows us once more our roots. I was not able to put this book down once I started reading it.

Anita Moorjani is a speaker and intercultural consultant for multinational corporations. After suffering from cancer (end stage lymphoma) for about four years, her organs started shutting down in 2006 and she went in to a deep coma.  The author mentions that she experienced afterlife in the near death experience. After she revived from her comatose state, her body started to heal and within months she was free from cancer. "Dying to be me" is her book on this incredulous episode of her life.

In 2002, Anita was working in Hong Kong when she was diagnosed with lymphoma whcih all started with a lump in her neck. Though she rejected conventional medicine initially, she subsequently underwent several conventional treatments as her attempts for treating her condition with alternative methods failed. The lymphoma had spread throughout her body and had metastasized. Towards the later phase there were tumor growths all over the upper part of her body, her lungs were perpetually filled with fluid, and she was on oxygen. Her doctors proclaimed that she was in the final hours of her life. She went in to coma.

It was then that Anita experience her near death experience. There were some aspects of her experience which are common to other such experiences and some that were special to her. I, from my own knowledge, am aware that the NDEs are not the same for everyone; there are some fundamental commonalities, like a few near and dear ones coming to receive you and awareness of what is going on in space surrounding the physical body, but there are also lot of differences. Anita mentions that she was persuaded to return to her physical body by the souls of her deceased father and a deceased friend.

Subsequent to her revival from coma, Anita experience an almost spontaneous cure. Within five weeks, she was free from cancer and released from hospital. All her tumors were gone.

Some of the messages that came across to me are:

• For true joy and happiness look inward, do that which bring joy to you
• Love yourself for what you are, and then and only then can you aspire to touch Godliness.
• Live from your heart. Permit your head to work on those things that your heart (soul) allows.
• Do not combat a negative feeling. Acknowledge it. It will play out. The more one tries to combat a negative feeling, stronger it becomes. And what is more important is that stop judging yourself by your negative feelings.

“I can’t say this strongly enough, but our feelings about ourselves are actually the most important barometer for determining the condition of our lives! In other words, being true to ourselves is more important than just trying to stay positive!’

                                               .......Anita Moorjani

Namaste

Prabir

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Must Read Autobiographies - XXVIII

Testament of Youth

Vera Brittain

Testament of Youth, is the memoir of Vera Brittain's (1893 - 1970) life covering the period 1900 to 1925. This was published in 1933. She continued with her memoirs with Testament of Experience, covering the period 1925 - 1950 published in 1957. Between these two books comes Testament of Friendship, which was published in 1940

Testament of Youth has been acclaimed as a classic for its description of the impact of World War I on the lives of women and the middle-class civilian population of Great Britain. The book shows how the impact extended into the postwar years. It is also considered a classic in feminist literature for its depiction of a woman's pioneer struggle to forge an independent career in a society only grudgingly tolerant of educated women.

The narrative begins with Vera's plans to enter the Oxford University and her romance with Roland Leighton, a friend of her brother Edward. Both were commissioned as officers early in World War I, and both were subsequently killed, as were several other members of their social circle.

The book's main subject is Vera's work as a Voluntary Aid detachment Work nurse, nursing wounded in London, Malta and at Etaples in France. It also describes how she returned, disillusioned, to Somerville College, Oxford after the war and completed her BA degree. It covers the beginning of her career in journalism, and lecturing for the League of Nations. She visits the graves of her brother Edward in Italy and her fiancé Roland in France. She toured the defeated and occupied regions of Germany and Austria in 1923.

It concludes with her meeting her husband George Catlin and their eventual marriage in 1925.

Namaste

Prabir

Must Read Autobiographies - XXIII

The Double Helix

James D.Watson

The Double Helix : A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, written by American molecular biologist James D. Watson and published in 1968, is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. He is best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

Though an important book about an immensely important subject, it was and remains a controversial account. Though it was originally slated to be published by Harvard University Press,  Watson's home university, Harvard dropped the arrangement after protestations from Francis and Maurice. The book was subsequently published by  Atheneum in the United States and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK.

The intimate first-person memoir about scientific discovery was unusual for its time. The book has been hailed for its highly personal view of scientific work, though has been criticised as caring only about the glory of priority and the author is claimed to be willing to appropriate data from others surreptitiously in order to obtain it. It has also been criticized as being excessively sexist towards Rosalind Franklin, another participant in the discovery, who was deceased by the time Watson's book was written.

Namaste

Prabir

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Must Read Autobiographies - XXVI

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, written by Dave Eggers, was published in 2000. It is his memoir of his days of mentoring and bringing up his younger brother, Christopher  chronicles following the cancer-related deaths of his parents.

Mentioned by Times magazine and other newspaper as the best book of the year, this book won critical acclaim and became a commercial hit. The Times selected the book as the 12 th best book of the decade.

In Lake Forest, Illinois, Dave and his siblings, Bill, Beth and Christopher endure the sudden death of their father due to lung cancer. Their mother dies a month later from stomach cancer after a long struggle.

Afterwards, Dave, Beth and Christopher move to California. Bill eventually moves to Los Angeles. Beth lives on her own at first, and Toph becomes Dave's responsibility. Dave, a man only in his early 20s, has to raise a child as if he were his own. Dave's life can no longer involve things many 20-year-olds would like to do. For example, Dave can not stay out of the house all night at the bar and bring home a different girl every week, something which he talks about wanting to do in his book in detail.

With the help of an inheritance and Social Security, Dave and Toph rent apartments in neighborhoods where Toph can go to private schools and Dave can work on his magazine venture. Dave is occasionally self-conscious about the cleanliness of their various homes and worries that other people will mistakenly find him unfit to parent Toph, but counterbalances these images with recollections of including Toph in fun activities and cooking, laundering, and driving for Toph.

Dave struggles between moments of feeling that his approach to parenting is calculated and brilliantly designed to make Toph well-adjusted, to worrying that his hands-off approach and commitment to personal projects will make Toph maladjusted. Dave's own attempts to lead a normal life as a young adult often involve fairly ordinary encounters with women and alcohol. Due to his parents' death and his duty to take care of Toph, he feels robbed of his youth, and this fuels his pursuit of sex and irresponsibility.

Dave and his friends organize an independent magazine called Might in San Fransico and become engrossed in the alienated youth subculture. Much of the magazine's history is portrayed in the book. 

About halfway through Dave Eggers's memoir, he interviews to be on MTV's ''Real World,'' and in the process describes what it was like to grow up in Lake Forest, Illinois., before both his parents died of cancer in a span of 32 days, leaving him, at 21, to raise his 8-year-old brother, Christopher, or Toph, on his own. 

Namaste

Prabir

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Must Read Autobiographies - XXVII

The Hare With Amber Eyes

Edmund De Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes, a memoir by the famous British ceramicist Edmund De Waal, was published in 2010. De Waal tells the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussis lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis confiscated their property. Even after the war, the family failed to recover most of its extensive property, including priceless artwork, but an easily hidden collection of 264 Japanese miniature sculptures was miraculously saved, tucked away inside a mattress by Anna, a loyal maid in Vienna during the war years. The collection has been passed down through five generations of the Ephrussi family, providing a common thread for the story of its fortunes from 1871 to 2009

These sculptures came to De Waal, as inheritance from his great uncle Iggie. "I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers and where it has been." So, leaving his studio in the care of others, off he went. He would tell their story - the story of the miniature scuptures - the netsuke.

The netsuke were bought from a dealer in Paris in the 1870s by Charles Ephrussi, a relative of his great grandfather, Viktor. Charles is a collector who once bought a still life of asparagus from Manet at a price so generous the artist sent him a canvas of a further, single stalk in gratitude.They were kept in a black lacquer vitrine until, one day, Charles sent them to Vienna as a wedding present for his cousin Viktor. 

But at Viktor's home, they were equally out of place. And there they stayed, a cuckoo in the nest, as the first world war began, and ended, and then, as Austria, unable to feed its people, allowed antisemitism to take hold. In March 1938, the Ephrussi home was invaded by men in swastika armbands. Some things were stolen, others destroyed, but the netsuke remained mysteriously intact.

In 1947, Elisabeth's brother, Ignace (Iggie), visited Tunbridge Wells between postings for an international grain exporter. Should he go to the Congo or to Japan? They looked at the netsuke together and his decision was made for him. And it was in Japan, in 1991, that de Waal first set eyes on his future inheritance, now repatriated by Iggie. The young potter was studying in Japan and every week he lunched with his great uncle. Afterwards, they examined the netsuke, one by one. The hare with the amber eyes. A tiger. A tumble of tortoises. After the Anschluss, the family fled. Emmy took her own life in the Ephrussi country house in Czechoslovakia. Viktor and his children escaped elsewhere: his daughter, Elisabeth (de Waal's grandmother), took her father to Tunbridge Wells. After the war, she travelled to Vienna to discover what remained of the family's possessions. Not much was the answer, but a maid, Anna, saved the netsuke from the Nazis, hiding them in her mattress.

De Waal has researched his story with obsessive diligence and he tells it with an imaginative commitment.

Namaste

Prabir

Must Read Autobiographies - XXV

The Year Of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), written by Joan Didion, was first published in 2005. It is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Dunne, in 2003. 

Days before his death, their daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized in New York with pneuonia which developed more complications. John died when Quintana she was still unconscious. During 2004 Quintana was again hospitalized after a collapse and brain hemorrhage.

The narrative structure of the book follows Didion's re-living and re-analysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for Quintana. With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book.

The title of the book refers to magical thinking in a sense that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions then an unavoidable event can be averted. Didion reports many instances of her own magical thinking, particularly the story in which she cannot give away Dunne's shoes, as he would need them when he returned. The experience of insanity or derangement that is part of grief is a major theme, about which Didion was unable to find a great deal of existing literature.

Didion applies the iconic reportorial detachment for which she is known to her own experience of grieving; there are few expressions of raw emotion. Through observation and analysis of changes in her own behavior and abilities, she indirectly expresses the toll her grief is taking. She is haunted by questions concerning the medical details of her husband's death, the possibility that he sensed it in advance, and how she might have made his remaining time more meaningful. Fleeting memories of events and persistent snippets of past conversations with John take on a new significance. Her daughter's continuing health problems and hospitalizations further compound and interrupt the natural course of grief.

It is a classic account of personal grief.

Namaste

Prabir

Must Read Autobiographies - XXIV

Out Of Africa

Karen Blixen

Out of Africa, a memoir written by the Danish author Karen Blixen (Baroness Karen Von Blixen-Finecke), was first published in 1937. The book is recounts her life on her coffee plantation in British East Africa (Kenya), as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. 

Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa  in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony. The young Baron and Baroness bought farmland in the Ngong Hills about ten miles southwest of Nairobi.

The Blixens had planned to raise dairy cattle, but Bror developed their farm as a coffee plantation instead. It was managed by Europeans, including, at the start, Karen’s brother Thomas – but most of the labor was provided by “squatters.” This was the colonial term for local Kikuyu tribespeople who guaranteed the owners 180 days of labour in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm on the uncultivated lands which, in many cases, had simply been theirs before the British arrived and claimed them.

When the First World War drove coffee prices up, the Blixen family invested in the business, and in 1917 Karen and Bror expanded their holdings to six thousand acres. 

The Blixens’ marriage started well – Karen and Bror went on hunting safaris which Karen later remembered as paradisiacal. But it was not ultimately successful: Bror, a talented hunter and a well liked companion, was an unfaithful husband and a poor businessman. In 1921 the couple separated, and in 1925 they were divorced; Karen took over the management of the farm on her own.

She was well suited to the work – fiercely independent and capable, she loved the land and liked her native workers. But the climate and soil of her particular tract was not ideal for coffee-raising; the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields, and the falling market price of coffee was no help. The farm sank further and further into debt until, in 1931, the family corporation forced her to sell it. The buyer, Remi Martin, who planned to carve it into residential plots, offered to allow Blixen to stay in the house. She declined, and returned to Denmark.

Blixen moved back to the family’s estate of Rungstedlund and lived with her mother; there she took up again the writing career that she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth. In 1934 she published a fiction collection, Nine Tales, now known as Seven Gothic Tales, and in 1937 she published her Kenyan memoir, Out of Africa.

The book opens with two sections on the Africans who lived or had business on the farm, and include close observations of native ideas about justice and punishment in the wake of a gruesome accidental shooting. The third section, called “Visitors to the Farm,” describes some of the more colourful local characters who considered Blixen’s farm to be a safe haven. The fourth, “From an Immigrant’s Notebook,” is a collection of short sub-chapters in which Blixen reflects on the life of a white African colonist.

In the fifth and final section, “Farewell to the Farm,” Blixen details the farm’s financial failure, and the untimely deaths of several of her closest friends in Kenya. The book ends with the farm sold, and with Blixen heading towards the boat on the coast. 

Blixen’s wistfulness is fueled and informed by a loss greater than her own farm: the loss of Kenya itself. In the first two decades of the 20th century, many of Kenya’s European settlers saw their colonial home as a kind of timeless paradise.

Settlement was sparse; life followed the slow, dreamy rhythms of annual dry and rainy seasons. A few thousand European colonists, many of them well-educated Britons from the landed gentry, held dominion over vast plantation estates covering tens of thousands of acres. Their farms were home to herds of elephants and zebra, and dozens of giraffes, lions, hippos, leopards – to a culture accustomed to the traditional pleasures of European aristocrats, Kenya was a hunter’s dream. Although the colonists imposed British law and economic control upon this new domain, they saw themselves not as conquerors or oppressors, but as benign stewards of the land and its people.

In Bilxen's descriptions of the Africa she knew, a note of mourning for this irretrievably lost world.

Namaste

Prabir

Must Read Autobiographies - XXI

Giving Up The Ghost

Hillary Mantel

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, is an English writer, who has twice been awarded the Booker prize

 Among the book's themes are ghosts and illness, both of which Mantel has much experience with. She elaborates on her earliest years, and then on medical treatments in her 20s. At age seven she senses a horrifying creature in the garden, which as a Catholic she concludes is the devil; later, houses she lives in have "minor poltergeists." The first and foremost ghost, though, is the baby she will never have. By 20, Mantel is in constant pain from endometriosis, and at 27, after years of misdiagnosis and botched treatment, she has an operation that ends her fertility. Her pains come back, she has thyroid problems and drug treatments cause her body to balloon; she describes these ordeals with remarkably wry detachment. Fans of Mantel's critically acclaimed novels may enjoy the memoir as insight into her world. Often, though, all the fine detail that in another work would flesh out a plot—such as embroidery silk "the scarlet shade of the tip of butterflies' wings"—has nowhere to go.

Namaste

Prabir

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Must Read Autobiographies - XXII

Diaries, Vol - I

Alan Clark

Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1928 – 1999) was a British Conservative Member Of Parliament. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's  governments at the Departments of Emoyment, Trade and Defence, and became a privy councillor in 1991.

Alan Clark kept a regular diary from 1955 until August 1999, when he was incapacitated due to brain tumor which was to be the cause of his death a month later. The last month of his life would be chronicled by his wife, Jane.

His diaries are published in three volumes.

• Volume 1 Diaries: In Power 1983–1992 
• Volume 2 Diaries: Into Politics 1972–1982 
• Volume 3 Diaries: The Last Diaries 1993–1999 

Alan Clark published his diaries covering the period 1983 to 1992 after he left the House Of Commons, deciding not to seek re-election to his seat. Published in 1993 and known simply as Diaries they have been recognised as a definitive account of the downfall of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Before his death in 1999, Clark had started work on the prequel to the 1983–1992 Diaries to cover his entry in politics, from seeking a Conservative Association to adopt him as their Parliamentary Candidate in 1972 until the 1983 General Election. Published a year after his death, this volume was titled Diaries: Into Politics and covered 1972 to 1983.

The final volume, covering Clark's decision not to seek re-election at the 1992 General Election, his regret at leaving the House of Commons and then his return to Parliament was published in 2002 and included Clark's final days dying from a brain tumour.

The diaries include much reference to Clark's love of his chalet at Zermatt, his Scottish estate at Eriboll  and the architecture of Saltwood Castle, his home in Kent. Clark's fascination with classic cars is also evident, as is his enthusiasm for backgammon

The Diaries were serialised into six episodes of The Alan Clark Diaries by the BBC

The Vol I diary opens with Alan Clark, Conservative Member of Parliament for Plymouth Sutton since February 1974, about to seek re-election at the 1983 general election. The Conservatives were expected to win the election, following the recent Falklands War and a disunited Labour Party, and Clark expected to be promoted from the back benches.

Early on in the diaries, Clark records the death of his father, the author, broadcaster and art historian, Kenneth Clark, from whom Clark inherited Salthwood Castle in Hythe, Kent.

In the very next entry in the diary, we get an insight into one of Clark's recurring lapses with the opposite sex. His opponent at the election, the Labour candidate, was 22-year-old Frances Holland, of whom Clark records;

"I'm madly in love with Frances Holland. I suspect she's not as thin and gawky as she seems. Her hair is always lovely and shiny. Perhaps I can distract her at the count on Thursday and kiss her in one of those big janitors' cupboards off the Lower Guildhall"

Clark is, at this time, also carrying on an adulterous affair with Valerie Harkess, the wife of a South African judge, and her two daughters. The affair became public knowledge in 1992 after Clark left the House of Commons, and it was cited in the Harkess divorce case.

Clark was a passionate supporter of animal rights, joining activists in demonstrations at Dover against live export and outside the House of Commons in support of Animal Liberation Front hunger-striker Barry Horne. When he died from the  brain tumour, his family said Clark wanted it to be stated that he had "gone to join Tom and the other dogs."

Namaste

Prabir