Books of Interest
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Alive (The Richness and Brevity of Existence)
By: Gabriel Weston
Narrated By: Gabriel Weston
Gabriel Weston (Author, English surgeon, television presenter.)
Gabriel Weston’s “Alive” is an intimate, blunt, and enlightening explanation of her experience as a woman, surgeon, mother, and member of the human race. For some, Weston’s story contains more information than one is prepared to take.
It begins with a self-effacing assessment of her early education in liberal arts where she achieved an MA in English. However, she decides to go to medical school in London where she qualifies as a physician in 2000. Her very personal memoir explains a great deal about being educated as a physician but more about being a woman.
Some reader/listeners will be put off by Weston’s blunt explanation of the human body. However, some will find much of what she writes as revelatory.
Weston explains what it means to be human and a woman who becomes a mother of twins at the age of forty, with two younger children.
It is hard to imagine a younger person who is uninterested in science, technology, engineering, or math, who receives an MA in English, would be interested in becoming a surgeon.
However, Weston chooses to become a doctor and graduates from a London medical school in 2000. She briefly explains her journey in “Alive” by reflecting on her classes in body dissection to explain the details of the human body and differences in sexual anatomy. Some will choose to leave her story, but others (if they stick with it) will be enlightened and surprised by her observations and opinions.
Weston notes the equivalent of the male penis is a woman’s clitoris. This is an interesting observation that most would be unlikely to publicly discuss or write about.
Presumably, Weston is making this point to show there is a great deal of similarity between men and women. However, she notes a significant difference. Menstruation is a sluffing process where the uterus sheds a layer of bedding material that exits the body through the vagina, i.e., something unique to women. The purpose of menstruation is to prepare the body for possible pregnancy by providing a thickening to the uterus that supports fertilization. That thickening is removed (sluffed off) approximately once per month. As is often noted, only women give birth, a singular difference between the sexes.
The two girls come late in her adult life. They are delivered in a caesarian operation. Children are born in amniotic sacs. This is likely a surprise to most men because birth of a baby is thought of as a delivery with a squirming body through the birth canal rather than a body within an amniotic sac. However, Weston notes the second twin is delivered within its amniotic sac which suggests she is a fraternal, rather than identical twin.
Syria’s use of nerve gas to murder their own citizens.
Weston’s story moderates in future chapters with notes about nerve gases used by governments to suffocate their own people as well as perceived foreign enemies. The point she makes is that oxygen deprivation in the 21st century and beyond is increasing with rising pollution on earth. She notes oxygen deprivation is the same suffocation caused when governments used lethal gases to kill their own citizens as perceived enemies. The obvious inference is today’s denial of earth’s environmental degradation risks the lives of all oxygen dependent lives.
Weston is an example of a working mother who succeeds in England despite the world’s history of misogyny.
Some women become a success despite the many obstacles they face. Weston symbolizes human grit and determination in the face of sexual inequality of opportunity but, as a human being, she is subject to the physical limitations of every life. She mentions during the course of her story a heart murmur that is caused by a defective heart valve. The last chapters of her book explain Weston is on a transplant list.
The randomness of life and what we make of it is the most important theme of Weston’s insightful memoir about being “Alive”.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 