The Bright Hour
A Memoir of Living and Dying
خاطرات زندگی و مردن
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
THE BRIGHT HOUR is a thing of beauty. Nina Riggs is honest and profoundly human as she comes to terms with life with terminal cancer and death. Narrator Cassandra Campbell is just perfect. She matches Riggs's emotions at every stage, and her lovely smooth voice has a bittersweet quality. The memoir manages to be both entertaining and heartbreaking as Riggs considers her family medical history (about the worst lottery ticket ever), loses her mother to multiple myeloma, reminisces about meeting her husband in a graveyard, and endures brutal treatments that bring no cure. She is funny, too--she can't seem to decide which couch to buy, her widowed father starts riding a motorcycle, and she plans post-death emails to her sons if they ever view pornography on the internet. The short afterword from Riggs's husband is narrated by Kirby Heyborne. It feels like losing a beautiful friend when it's over. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
September 15, 2017
Riggs died February 26, 2017. Cassandra Campbell gently narrates most of the work, until Kirby Heyborne takes over to read the afterword by Riggs's husband, John, and shatters your heart. For a book about fatal diseases--Riggs was diagnosed at 37 with breast cancer; her mother with multiple myeloma, from which she died just months before her daughter--this memoir is bright with joy, laughter, and enveloping love. The mother of two young sons and wife to John, whom she met in a graveyard joking about Kant and Kierkegaard during a college summer job, Riggs never loses sight of what inspires and nurtures her, even as her "days are filled with imagining how to wind things down." Riggs finds calming balm in the writings of her great-great-great-grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, twinned with 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne's meditations. Her ruminations about her diagnosis, treatments, and losses are unblinkingly honest with pain and frustration, but grace and courage somehow prevail. VERDICT Readers who were moved by Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club, or Jeffrey Zaslow's The Last Lecture will find exquisite solace in this Bright Hour. ["Whether confronting disease or not, everyone should read this beautifully crafted book as it imbues life and loved ones with a particularly transcendent glow": LJ 4/1/17 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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