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Rating: 
Summary: Slow going
Review: I have to disagree with the other reviewer with 5 stars. The book just didn't grab me as I hoped it would, and it was a bit of a struggle to complete. I thought about ditching it at around page 50, but continued on to see if it improved--which it did to a small extent. After reading other books about people with illnesses, I found that Tiger's Eye paled in comparison. Go for "It's Not About the Bike" by Lance Armstrong if you want a more gripping personal account of someone dealing and overcoming serious illness. Now that's a real page-turner!
Rating:
Summary: Slow going
Review: I have to disagree with the other reviewer with 5 stars. The book just didn't grab me as I hoped it would, and it was a bit of a struggle to complete. I thought about ditching it at around page 50, but continued on to see if it improved--which it did to a small extent. After reading other books about people with illnesses, I found that Tiger's Eye paled in comparison. Go for "It's Not About the Bike" by Lance Armstrong if you want a more gripping personal account of someone dealing and overcoming serious illness. Now that's a real page-turner!
Rating: 
Summary: Hour of Lead, Remembered
Review: Tiger's Eye is Inga Clendinnen's account of her diagnosis of a rare liver disease, her rapidly debilitating illness, finally a liver transplant and ultimate if precarious recovery. But that is like saying Moby Dick is about whaling. This historian from Australia has written a superb treatise full of hard truths on both illness and memory. After all, the truth is not always carried on angels' wings. Along the way she also has written fiction-- short stories-- and some of the history of Australia. After her diagnosis of Active Auto-Immune Hepatitis, she began writing this memoir on her laptop computer, not knowing if she would live or not. She writes searing accounts of her hospitalization: the good, the bad, the indifferent hospital personnel. The visitors who came late and leave early, to get back to their lives outside an institution. Ms. Clendinnen writes: "What distinguishes the healthy from the ill--which is a more significant division in any society than class or gender or possibly even homelessness--is that the healthy consider feeling well to be the normal state of things." Then there is memory and all the attendant problems. For example, two children of the same parents have different recollections of their parents, but they are both right. "Being ill had taught me how much of ourselves there is in all the stories we tell about the past." Ms. Clendinnen wanted to preserve the memories of her parents, to try to discover what they were like before she was born. The portraits, "as accurate as memory allows," the author would say, of her parents are the best thing I think in this book. Her descriptions of her mother Catherine, born in Melbourne in 1897-- and her futile attempts ever really to know her mother made my eyes water. Her mother's hard life was in some part her own making. Not all her sisters, for example, were as miserable as she. About her mother's death, Ms. Clendinnen writes "how could her life be ending when it had not yet begun? Bound from childhood in a net of unsought obligations, she fought hard, but with weapons which always turned and lacerated her own flesh. In the desolation of old age, with death imminent, I think she finally knew herself to have been trapped, and defeated, from the beginning." Ms. Clendinnen named this memoir Tiger's Eye after her favorite animal, the tiger, "because he was the only animal who did not acknowledge he was in a cage. . . I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod, but the kaleidoscope of the horror of helplessness ceased to turn because I withdrew my consent from it." Like Melville's Ishmael, the now wiser writer lived to tell her tale: "Illness granted me a set of experiences otherwise unobtainable. It liberated me from the routines which would have delivered me, unchallenged and unchanged, to discreet death. Illness casts you out, but it also cuts you free. I will never take conventional expectations seriously again, and the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." There is so much to learn from Ms. Clendinnen's ordeal-- about illness, about courage, about getting on with our lives. A very fine book indeed.
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