Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9406190148
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Short
Reynolds Price is Professor of English at Duke University but, more importantly to the world of letters, a novelist, playwright, poet, translator, etc. He teaches the craft of writing and he "does" it, too.
As this memoir begins in the middle of a successful and productive life, he also has a measure of personal ignorance of life's frailties and vicissitudes. Subtle signs that seem only to betoken middle age beset him. But they progress and he soon finds himself successively in the hands of an internist, a neurologist and a radiation oncologist.
There is a tumor compressing his spinal cord, threatening to rob the lower half of his body of the function its form intended.
As the most recent chapter of the book ends, ten years later, Price is a paraplegic, confined, only in the narrowest sense of the term, to a wheelchair. He has not only survived but grown, albeit along a different path than the one he travelled for the first half century of his life. With abiding aid from family, friends, colleagues and physicians, he has created a "whole" - not half - new self and thereby "A Whole New Life."
Price's mastery of the writer's art ensures that this story is eminently readable. That was predictable. What none could have predicted of such a catastrophe was that the author would accept his trials without self-pity or loathing, and emerge a new person of his own making, whole and entire in spirit, creative and productive as ever.
While his story may not be a guide to another beset by physical catastrophe, it is an exemplar of the resilience of the human spirit in adversity.
- Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.
by CNB