PDF The Unwinding of the Miracle A Memoir of Life Death and Everything That Comes After Audible Audio Edition Julie YipWilliams Emily Woo Zeller Joshua Williams Random House Audio Books
Download As PDF : The Unwinding of the Miracle A Memoir of Life Death and Everything That Comes After Audible Audio Edition Julie YipWilliams Emily Woo Zeller Joshua Williams Random House Audio Books
New York Times Best Seller
As a young mother facing a terminal diagnosis, Julie Yip-Williams began to write her story, a story like no other. What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more - a powerful exhortation to the living.
"An exquisitely moving portrait of the daily stuff of life." (The New York Times Book Review - Editors' Choice)
That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to flee with her family the political upheaval of her country in the late 1970s. Loaded into a rickety boat with 300 other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. She would go on to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, and a life she had once assumed would be impossible. Then, at age 37, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began.
The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion - this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep - an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously.Â
With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie Yip-Williams set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle the story of her life.
Praise for The Unwinding of the Miracle
"Everything worth understanding and holding on to is in this book.... A miracle indeed." (Kelly Corrigan, New York Times best-selling author)
"A beautifully written, moving, and compassionate chronicle that deserves to be read and absorbed widely." (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies)
PDF The Unwinding of the Miracle A Memoir of Life Death and Everything That Comes After Audible Audio Edition Julie YipWilliams Emily Woo Zeller Joshua Williams Random House Audio Books
"Absolutely love this book. I could not put this book down and I wished I had read this years before when my sister-in-law was dying of cancer, or when my friend was dying of cancer also. I know it was a way for the author, Julie, to write down her thoughts and feelings during the last few days of her life. It was a testimony to her family, her love of life and it was honest, emotionally piercing to the soul and tender. There was anger in the book, which she did not deny herself of, grief and joy.
I cannot tell more about it because if I do, I will spoil it for the next reader and I cannot do that. This book is not one of those happy books where the reader dies gracefully and peacefully. No. She raged against the fates but at the same time, she was so appreciative of the world we live in. She did cry and she will make you cry, but she will also make you admire her at the end for being so divinely human. Her bravery was not in how she died, but in how she embraced her life and how she shared it with the rest of us. She opened her heart to the world and for this reader, she has left an unforgettable imprint on my life."
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The Unwinding of the Miracle A Memoir of Life Death and Everything That Comes After Audible Audio Edition Julie YipWilliams Emily Woo Zeller Joshua Williams Random House Audio Books Reviews :
The Unwinding of the Miracle A Memoir of Life Death and Everything That Comes After Audible Audio Edition Julie YipWilliams Emily Woo Zeller Joshua Williams Random House Audio Books Reviews
- I am a sucker for bleak books and chose this one because of the blurb by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee author, of the Emperor of All Maladies, which I loved. But it turns out that this book is not bleak. Mostly it's instructive, inspirational, and hopeful. Julie Yip-Williams, with beliefs based in Buddhism, shows the world through her words how to approach death with" the dignity and grace of an evolved soul." As someone who has tried and failed at Christianity (for which I have no regrets), I find her philosophy thought-provoking. If there's a silver lining in this beyond this pretty brilliant book, it's that she had access to excellent care and was blessed with seemingly exceedingly intelligent and amazingly talented children and an excellent support system. The authors' recounting of her life (which almost ended in infanticide), including up-by-her bootstraps educational efforts achieved in spite of blindness, her battle with stage IV cancer (including intimate details about her treatment and the disease's progression), and thoughts about her impending death are intertwined masterfully. Like Paul Kalanithi's book When Breath Becomes Air, she shows readers what choosing to live a life less ordinary in the face of tragedy looks like. What I love most is that she acknowledges her own flaws in thinking and acting (and that of others) in the face of this unfairness and "how impotent we truly are in the face of unseen forces that would cause the earth to tremble or cells to mutate and send a body into full rebellion against itself," yet sees through to the beauty in life. In the end, she exhorts us to, "Live while you're living."
- This book had been compared to “When Breath Becomes Air†which I read and loved. I did not love this book, nor did I like it. Although it is sad that Julie died at a young age leaving two young daughters, I did not connect with her at all. Her descriptions of how best to live your life were irritating. Having had friends who died of stage IV cancer, I was annoyed at her negative description of people who choose to remain hopeful in the face of a horrible disease. When some people have to schedule their chemo on a Friday so they can return to work on Monday, Julie never returned to her job after her diagnosis. She discussed the great effort it took her, after purchasing the apartment next door, to work with contractors to double the size of their living space. Money to buy the best was not an object. I never got the impression that she realized how fortunate she was to have family to help her and the freedom to choose treatment without worrying about paying for it.
- Absolutely love this book. I could not put this book down and I wished I had read this years before when my sister-in-law was dying of cancer, or when my friend was dying of cancer also. I know it was a way for the author, Julie, to write down her thoughts and feelings during the last few days of her life. It was a testimony to her family, her love of life and it was honest, emotionally piercing to the soul and tender. There was anger in the book, which she did not deny herself of, grief and joy.
I cannot tell more about it because if I do, I will spoil it for the next reader and I cannot do that. This book is not one of those happy books where the reader dies gracefully and peacefully. No. She raged against the fates but at the same time, she was so appreciative of the world we live in. She did cry and she will make you cry, but she will also make you admire her at the end for being so divinely human. Her bravery was not in how she died, but in how she embraced her life and how she shared it with the rest of us. She opened her heart to the world and for this reader, she has left an unforgettable imprint on my life. - I ordered and read this book because I've had Stage 3 cancer and I needed to know what this author had to say about her Stage 4 journey, in case I end up there. I am glad the author was so honest about her feelings, including her resentments when comparing her fate to those of others. We read obituaries that make cancer victims sound like saints and pillars of courage as they battled to stay alive, but I knew I wasn't the only one who had doubts, feelings of weakness, and other negative thoughts. I totally related to the author's desire to shout "I have cancer!! I'm dying!!" as she smiled and exchanged pleasantries with others, and I related to the sensation of being suddenly cut off and removed from other people and the world itself.
The author died young and left two small children behind. This makes her story sadder. I'm glad she went into great detail about the treatments she pursued for her cancer, including the array of drugs. I declined all drugs except those used for surgery, but I am interested in others' decisions and how they feel about those choices later on. Stage 4, which is metastatic cancer, is a different ball game, and I could relate to the author's sense that many don't understand what Stage 4 means for survival chances. I've felt many people may be misled by the cheerleading for people who have had Stage 1 breast cancer, for example, while those with metastatic cancer and poor survival chances are kind of disregarded, even in "support" groups. The author seemed to feel that even some with metastatic cancer are not facing the reality of their situation and that they hold out unrealistic hope for beating the cancer even as they are at death's door. I'm not sure what to say to that. I know people who have survived Stage 4 for many years. What we tell ourselves is important. In the end, though, we are just left to wonder why outcomes differ. Books like this one help us gather some clues, perhaps.
The book is a bit repetitive about the author's early experiences with being born blind and having family members almost kill her because of it. I feel these passages are repetitive because the book is really a journal, and these were things the author revisited a number of times to gain resolution as she faced her mortality.
I was heartened to read her husband's contribution to the book. I'm glad to have read what they shared. Thank you.
