Two Weeks of Life

March 3, 2008
In this elegant, heartrending account of the final choices we make, journalist Clift (Founding Sisters) juxtaposes the death of two people, one close to her and the other a national cause celebre. Clift's husband of 20 years, Tom Brazaitis, also a journalist, was diagnosed with metastatic kidney cancer in 1999, and after undergoing various debilitating treatments, by March 2005 he lay dying in his home hospice. Meanwhile, the fate of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a permanent vegetative state in a Florida hospice, hung in the balance, decided by courts and President Bush himself. Shiavo's husband and parents were battling over the decision to cease feeding her by tube, and their family custody case turned into a crusade led by vociferous fundamentalist Christians. In diary format, Clift recounts the history of Tom's illness and their relationship while weaving in references to the Shiavo case and touching knowledgeably on the history of the hospice movement. The two main narratives work surprisingly well together, the tenderness and pathos of the first serving to illuminate the complex moral issues of the second, and visa versa. The result is a moving portrait.

March 17, 2008
In this elegant, heartrending account of the final choices we make, journalist Clift (Founding Sisters) juxtaposes the death of two people, one close to her and the other a national cause célèbre. Clift's husband of 20 years, Tom Brazaitis, also a journalist, was diagnosed with metastatic kidney cancer in 1999, and after undergoing various debilitating treatments, by March 2005 he lay dying in his home hospice. Meanwhile, the fate of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a permanent vegetative state in a Florida hospice, hung in the balance, decided by courts and President Bush himself. Shiavo's husband and parents were battling over the decision to cease feeding her by tube, and their family custody case turned into a crusade led by vociferous fundamentalist Christians. In diary format, Clift recounts the history of Tom's illness and their relationship while weaving in references to the Shiavo case and touching knowledgeably on the history of the hospice movement. The two main narratives work surprisingly well together, the tenderness and pathos of the first serving to illuminate the complex moral issues of the second, and visa versa. The result is a moving portrait.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2007
While television audiences were watching the struggle involving brain-deadTeri Schiavo unfold, journalist Clift was dealing with her own life-and-death issues much closer to home. Her husband, Tom Brazatis, was dying of cancer. Clift uses these two events to look at the end-of-life challenges families must face. The stories dont always mesh well. Clifts situation with her husband is an intensely personal one, and readers will feel forthe couple as they learn of his diagnosis and their attempts to find extraordinary treatments to cure the cancer that originated in his kidney and then spread to his brain. Schiavos case had political overtones asright-to-life advocates politicized personal suffering, with Republicans bringing forth a law dealing just with the Schiavo situation. Yet despite the structural disconnect, both stories are clearly told and will certainly make readers think. Clift, who can be shrill in her television persona on the McLaughlin Report, is quiet and deliberate here. Despite being an outspoken liberal, she has sympathy for Shiavos parents, if not always their right-wing supporters. Brazatis was a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the book closes with the columns he wrote as he fought the good fight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)