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Chasing Daylight (Hardcover)
by Gene O'Kelly
| Category:
Biography, Motivation, Meaning of life, Thought on life and death |
| Market price: ¥ 218.00
MSL price:
¥ 198.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Gripping, sad and ultimately very life affirming, this beautifully written book is a gift to everyone who loves life. |
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Author: Gene O'Kelly
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Pub. in: December, 2005
ISBN: 0071471723
Pages: 160
Measurements: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01057
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0071471725
Language: American English
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- Awards & Credential -
Those who have read this book will recommend this book to everyone he/she knows. We are no exception. |
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- MSL Picks -
Chasing Daylight is a profound chronicle of Eugene O'Kelly's final 100 days of his life. He was diagnosed with late stage glioblastoma multiforme, which is terminal brain cancer. Within a week, he stepped down as CEO of KPMG and began to acclimate himself and his loved ones on how best to deal with this terminal disease.
As someone who is in the habit of setting goals and approaching every problem from a logical perspective, Gene O'Kelly began to make plans on what to do for the final three months of his life: He trains himself to live in the present, to find those perfect moments that crystallize the beauty of life, and to say his farewells to his friends, family and loved ones. In following his plan, and to his surprise, he attains what he's been after all along: peace.
There are few tragedies in life that can alter your perspective so profoundly, and one of those is being diagnosed with a terminal disease. It's like the blinders fall off and what seemed so important no longer matters, and what you always took for granted you now ardently embrace.
Gene and Corinne O'Kelly capture that so beautifully in Chasing Daylight. Gene's struggle with coming to terms with his death is heart wrenching, and Corinne's account of his final hours will bring tears to your eyes. Despite the short time he had to say good-bye to his loved ones, he did accomplish what he set out to do and then exited this life as a gentleman would: with perfect grace.
(From quoting Neilisa, USA)
Target readers:
Anyone and everyone who loves life and cherishes every moment of it.
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Eugene O'Kelly was born and raised in New York City. He started at KPMG as an assistant accountant in 1972 and ended his 30-plus year career as CEO, in which capacity he served from April 2002 to June 2005 before becoming a Senior Partner of the firm. He passed away September 10, 2005.
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From Publisher
"Must the end of life be the worst part?
Can it be made the best?”
At 53, Eugene O'Kelly was in the full swing of life. Chairman and CEO of KPMG, one of the largest U.S. accounting firms, he enjoyed a successful career and drew happiness from his wife, children, family, and close friends. He was thinking ahead: the next business trip, the firm's continued success, weekend plans with his wife, his daughter's first day of eighth grade.
Then in May 2005, Gene was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer and given three to six months to live. Just like that.
Now a growing darkness was absorbing the bright future he had seen for himself. He would have to change his plans, quickly, and capture what he could of his last diminishing days.
Chasing Daylight is the account of his final journey. Starting from the time of his diagnosis and concluded upon his death less than four months later, this book is his unforgettable story.
With startling intimacy, it chronicles the dissolution of Eugene O'Kelly's life and his gradual awakening to a more profound understanding. Interweaving unsettling details of his battle with cancer with his moment-to-moment reflections on life and death, love and success, spirituality and the search for meaning, it provides a testament to the power of the human spirit and a compelling message about how to live a more vivid, balanced, and meaningful life.
Inspiring, passionate, deeply insightful, Chasing Daylight is a remarkable man's poignant farewell to a beloved world.
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Janet Maslin (The New York Times, MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-15 00:00>
Voicing universal truths not often found in business or how-to tracts... [O'Kelly] made a success out of his final mission. |
Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-15 00:00>
O'Kelly, the former CEO and chairman of accounting juggernaut KPMG who was diagnosed with brain cancer at 53, writes about his "forthcoming death" as one would expect an accountant to: methodically. He charts his downward spiral, from symptoms to diagnosis to the process of dying in this poignant and posthumously published book. (O'Kelly died in September 2005.) O'Kelly's narrative recounts the steps he took to simplify his life-how he learned, for instance, "to be in the present moment, how to live there at least for snippets of time"-and the final experiences he shared with close friends and family. But his story falters on several occasions. O'Kelly provides few substantial details regarding his long career with KPMG; what information he does offer, and his wishes for the firm's continued success, read like portions of a company newsletter. He also refers constantly to his "wife of 27 years, Corinne, the girl of my dreams," but he fails to give readers a sense of her spirit and personality. (She wrote the final chapter, which takes place largely in the hospital as O'Kelly refuses food and water, eventually dying of an embolism.) Nor do readers learn much of O'Kelly's 14-year-old daughter, other than she's bright and he loves her. Though less than perfect, O'Kelly's examination of the life he lived and the opportunities he missed while climbing the corporate ladder will resonate with readers in "foot to the pedal" careers.
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BusinessWeek (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-15 00:00>
Even In Death,Gene O' Kelly Wanted To Succeed
When the CEO of KPMG learned he had terminal brain cancer, he set out to chronicle his last days
In the spring of 2004, Eugene O'Kelly had a premonition: Trouble was coming. He couldn't make out its shape or size, and the only response he could think of was to move from the townhouse in Manhattan he shared with his wife, Corinne, and their 12-year-old daughter, Gina, to a smaller apartment in the city. At the time, O'Kelly was chairman and chief executive of KPMG International, the accounting firm where he had worked for three decades. He was 52, at the peak of his career, feeling, as he would later say, "vigorous, indefatigable, and damn near immortal."
A year later he and Corinne had sold their house and most of their furniture and found a light-filled aerie overlooking the East River. Around the same time, Corinne noticed that the right side of her husband's face was sagging. He agreed to see a neurologist after he returned from a business trip to China by way of Seattle, where he would attend the Microsoft CEO Summit. Back in Manhattan the weekend before his appointment, he and Corinne were at a U2 concert with longtime clients when suddenly Corinne bolted from her seat. "I feel like our world is about to blow apart," she told her husband.
Within a week, Gene was diagnosed with inoperable late-stage brain cancer and, though no doctor would come right out and say so, he knew he couldn't expect to live past the summer. He died at home on Sept. 10. During those 100 days he worked with his wife and writer Andrew Postman to chronicle his attempt to face death with as much brightness, if not hope, as possible. Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life was published this month by McGraw-Hill, which, like BusinessWeek, is a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies. The book wasn't intended as a guide, Corinne says, but Gene was a mentor, and that instinct remained intact. His advice is simple: Confront your own mortality, sooner rather than later. As he says: "I'll be glad if my approach and perspective might provide help for a better death - and for a better life right now."
Gene was methodical, organized, unequivocating, thorough. He was an accountant by temperament as much as by training. Faced with imminent death, he wanted to be the master of his farewell. "I wanted these things, and only these things: Clarity. Intensity. Perfection... I was motivated to 'succeed' at death - that is, to try to be constructive about it, and thus have the right death for me. To be clear about it and present during it. To embrace it."
In early June he resigned from KPMG, started six weeks of radiation treatment to try to shrink the three tumors and diminish the symptoms (blurred vision, garbled speech, and certain cognitive impairments) that had begun to emerge. And he made a to-do list for his final days: get legal and financial affairs in order, unwind relationships, simplify, live in the moment, create (but also be open to) great moments, begin transition to next state, plan funeral. He recognized how Type A this was, yet what it required of him was the very opposite - to let go. As he says: "While I do believe that the business mindset is, in important ways, useful at the end of life, it sounds pretty weird to try to be CEO of one's own death... Given the profoundness of dying, and how different its quality felt from the life I led, I had to undo at least as many business habits as I tried to maintain."
With Corinne's guidance he began to meditate in the morning to help develop the mental discipline they both believed he would need in those last moments of life. It was on one of those mornings, when he had been sitting in the courtyard of the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in Upper Manhattan, with a fountain running in the background, that he told her he wanted the two of them to write a book about his dying.
SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
Corinne says now that she was initially ambivalent about the idea: At the time she was managing Gene's medical care, meeting with lawyers, concerned about Gina and their elder daughter, Marianne. She knew the project would sap Gene's energy. But he wanted to share what he called his spiritual journey, and he wanted to leave his daughters something. "The last gift I could give him was to let him do it his way and to make his dying as beautiful as possible," Corinne says, sitting in the living room she has only recently furnished.
From that moment in the Cloisters until the last week of his life, Gene wrote down his thoughts on a yellow legal pad or dictated them to his assistant. He worked intermittently throughout the day while also meeting with colleagues, friends, and family to, as he says, close their relationships. He also kept in touch with the new chairman of KPMG by phone. That summer the firm would admit to criminal tax fraud and agree to pay $456 million in penalties, a settlement that he had been working on. (He would say to Corinne: "This can't be another Enron.") Corinne says the fact that the case had been resolved helped Gene die peacefully.
At KPMG one of Gene's priorities had been to change the firm's culture - to make it more compassionate, a place where, he would later say, "we felt more alive." He wanted his staff "to get the most out of each moment and day - for the firm's benefit and the individual's - and not just pass through it." But as the head of the 20,000-employee company, he had remained relentlessly focused on the future, willing to sacrifice his home life for the satisfactions of the job.
In those last few months, though, he came to realize, he says, that his thinking had been too narrow, his boundaries too strict. "Had I known then what I knew now," he says, "almost certainly I would have been more creative in figuring out a way to live a more balanced life, to spend more time with my family." That, says Corinne, was his one regret. He had been getting better at finding that balance before he became sick, she says, but then he ran out of time. |
Kathleen San Martino (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-15 00:00>
This book is phenomenal. Those with a Type A personality will certainly appreciate the approach the author took to put closure on his impending death. Since another reader had mentioned that Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking was better, I had decided to read both books. I absolutely loved Chasing Daylight better although both books have value.
Chasing Daylight deals with the author's approach to putting closure on his life three months before his death; therefore, the book is more about life than death. Didion's book is about one person's disjointed feelings regarding the death of her husband and sickness of her child within days of each other. It offers a good look into the confused state of the grieving person. Both books look at life and death from different angles.
Chasing Daylight certainly makes one think of what is important in their life. I highly recommend it as reading for all - especially Type A people. I do not feel the author was too businesslike as suggested by another reader. I felt he dealt with his impending death head on and developed extremely important insights. One insight was about commitment. Commitment is not what most people think and this author touched on it perfectly. Commitment is not about how much time you put in at work or on a particular task or personal event. It's about the quality of that time and how passionate you are about that commitment. For those of you working all those long hours, you'll probably think twice after reading this book.
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