Johnny Gunther was only seventeen years old when he died of a brain tumor. During the months of his illness, everyone near him was unforgettably impressed by his level-headed courage, his wit and quiet friendliness, and, above all, his unfaltering patience through times of despair. This deeply moving book is a father's memoir of a brave, intelligent, and spirited boy.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 120 reviews)

I was in the Barnes and Noble on Broadway and couldn't find "Death Be Not Proud."

I was in the Barnes and Noble on Broadway and couldn't find "Death Be Not Proud." I was looking in the biography section and needless to say I was surprised on not finding it. I called an older clerk over and he looked too. He knew the book and he knew Johnny's story. He, too, was shocked.
We went to the computer and found out that it was classified as Biography, but as "Literature."
That started a conversation between the clerk and me. I told him that I just got back from Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, NY and seen Johnny's grave. I wanted to buy a copy of the book as a remembrance. He took a break and we had an interesting and thoughtful conversation about it.
More than a biography, more than a piece of literature, Death Be Not Proud is a celebration of life which is also a celebration of one particular life. The book is written by Johnny's Dad and tells the story of the last year of Johnny's after he developed a brain tumor. The humanity and decency of his parents, his doctors, but mostly, Johnny comes through on every page.
I was reading a critique by someone who thought that the book was pablum and a failure. They just don't get it. Johnny the whole time he is dying is keeping everyone else's spirits up. There can be no greater act of selflessness, than cheering up those who love you while you fight the good fight, even when you know that you aren't going to win. I think Johnny knew he was dying from the beginning and he dealt with it by "filling the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run."
A few weeks before he died, Johnny received notification that he had been accepted by Harvard. Over a year of suffering but he still attain his greatest goal.
Johnny Gunther was a man and, to me, "a man for all seasons."
I know that it is highly unlikely, but I wish everyone who faced death had a father, brother, sister, mother or friend like Johnny's Dad. Thanks to John Gunther Sr., Johnny will live forever.
And that is only right.

September 13, 2007

Shared pain....

My Mom had me read this old classic when I was about 10, only the book was not all that "old" then. I've reread it several times, and introduced my two kids to it at a young age, though certainly not at 10. This is WAY too heavy for the average youngster; fortunately, I've got pretty good reading ability.

John Gunther was a well-known author and journalist of the 1930's thru the 60's, famous for his "Inside" books; in April, 1946, his only child, Johnny, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor....he lived 15 months, most of it miserable, with small doses of hope thrown in. Gunther and his ex-wife, Frances, joined forces and did all that could have been done.

This is the story of Johnny's courage and determination. No child is as great as Gunther paints his son, but a father can be forgiven. The events surrounding Johnny's high school graduation somehow make the fight worth it. That Johnny fought without the comforts of religious faith is, of course, tragic...still, he fought.

An excellent picture is given of cancer treatment in the late 1940's, with introduction to Wilder Penfield, and other grand master neurosurgeons of the day. Chemotherapy was in its very infancy; diagnostic imaging was far different, and often brutal, with CAT scans and the MRI far in the future. We get to meet Max Gerson, and his controversial diet; I believe it's still in use. Cancer treatment is much different now, and the results for many types of tumors much better, but one irony is that the prognosis of glioblastoma multiforme is essentially what it was 60 years ago. And radiation therapy and neurosurgery are still rough.

My Mom was right about one thing; this book is still around long after John Gunther's other work is dated, and forgotten. A father shared his grief...I forgive him his excesses, and still recommend the book.
September 05, 2007

Less Impressive Than I Had Expected

A journalist and occasional novelist, John J. Gunther (1901-1970)was best known for the series of geo-political books he wrote during the 1930s and 1940s; today, however, he is best recalled for DEATH BE NOT PROUD. Published in 1949 and subtitled "A Memoir," it is a short work describing the final months of son Johnny Gunther, who died of a cancerous brain tumor in the late 1940s. Over the years many people have recommended this book to me, describing it as poetic in style, deeply touching in story, philosophical in content. Having at last read the work, I find the descriptions of it largely inaccurate and myself sharply unimpressed.

To hear his father tell it, Johnny Gunther was an entity without flaw, a seventeen year old who was charming in his shyness, brilliant beyond his years, corresponding with Einstein even as he bemoaned his lack of skill at sports, the perfect child, a paragon beyond paragons who endured great suffering with a smile. While I can easily accept the brilliance and integrity and strength of character--such people do exist--the portrait quickly becomes cloying; Gunther elevates Johnny to the level of plaster saint and it is tiresome in the extreme.

Gunther's prose is not in the least poetic; it is in fact the workman-like writing of the journalist he was. As for philosophical tone, this seems to consist of asking the time-honored questions about life and death and little more. In the end, DEATH BE NOT PROUD is the emotional purging of a grief-stricken parent who considers his loss to be unique instead of universal and therefore lacks the scope that one would really wish of this sort of memoir. Recommended, but primarily for the details it offers of the way in which cancer patients were treated in this era.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer
September 02, 2007

Emotion doesn't come cleaner

"Death Be Not Proud" could have been the worst book ever written. Consider: John Gunther, Jr. loses his only son to a brain tumor in 1947, when the boy is just 17. And Johnny was no ordinary boy --- he was brilliant, caring, funny. The kind of kid about whom, after his death, people say, "He was loved by everyone he ever met."

And that's just the summary. In fact, this kid was off the charts. He did original thinking in mathematics and wrote to Einstein --- and Einstein wrote back to encourage him. Unable to attend his boarding school because of his tumor, he got all his work done, aced his college admissions tests and would have gone to Harvard had he lived. And, through his 15-month ordeal of operations and treatments and diets and doctors and hope and despair, he never showed his parents how much he was afraid.

Here's how amazing: When his surgeon told Johnny he had a brain tumor, his immediate response was "Do my parents know this? How shall we break it to them?"

Imagine having a kid like that. Your only kid. And then sitting down and typing 150 pages about him.

Only the geezers among you will recognize the author, but John Gunther was, in his day, a megastar journalist. Just after World War II, he published a book called "Inside Europe," and it was so successful he went on to write a series of "Inside" books. His novels flopped, but no matter. He was a born journalist --- he knew how to tell a story with style and economy.

And "Death Be Not Proud" is the proof.

"Johnny came home for the Christmas holiday in 1945, and he looked fit and fine." That's the first sentence of Chapter One, and it's a model. You know the boy is going to die. You know you're in for an emotional wringer. But you also know this father is going to serve it up straight, adult to adult --- he's inviting you to rise to his level.

Big ideas? They're offered as sparingly as adverbs: "What I am trying to tell, however fumblingly and inadequately, is the story of a gallant fight for life, against the most hopeless odds, that should convey a relevance, a message, a lesson perhaps, to anyone who has ever faced ill health." What he doesn't need to say: That's you, dear reader, that's all of you, later if not today.

This is the story of an emergency --- can the Gunthers find a cure for the tumor before it takes their son? --- and so the writing is, correctly, terse. Over this non-fiction medical thriller Gunther lays a story just as exciting: Johnny's effort to preserve his intellect, to make his mind triumph over his body.

Of course there is no hope. Of course --- cruelly --- Johnny gets better. Several times. Only to relapse. Each time, Gunther just lays it out. You can feel him fraying as he writes, reliving how he frayed as he lived it. But he didn't crack then and so, if only for accuracy, he won't crack now.

There is a scene in this book that should be required reading for everyone who ever has to write. It occurs at the end, when Johnny leaves his bed in New York to attend graduation at Deerfield Academy in Western Massachusetts. He's desperately ill --- he'll die just eight days later --- but he's determined to walk into chapel with his class and grasp his diploma in his left hand, just like his friends.. Gunther takes you through that walk, step by step, the chapel rocking with cheers --- good luck forgetting those pages.

And then the end. The doctors are --- let Gunther have this metaphor --- "helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of death." The world contracts. Now it's mother, father, son, in the saddest of scenes:

"Johnny died at 11:02 P.M. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat-like curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little by little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief, Death took him."

An epilogue follows, but that's it, really. What can I say? Emotion doesn't come cleaner. You could throw a coin against those sentences and it would bounce back --- there's not a weak thought, an excess word.

"Death Be Not Proud" was published in 1949. It isn't likely to go out of print any time soon. The saga of a boy dying? Sure, it grabs you and holds you. But that's because the broken, grieving man who wrote it was so professional he got out of the way and just... told the story.
April 26, 2007

K. Brown - English Review

Death Be Not Proud is a story written by John Gunther about his son, Johnny Gunther, who developed a brain tumor when he was just the young age of seventeen. Throughout the time of Johnny's months with his tumor, his professors at Deerfield Academy, friends, and family are impressed by his courage and patience through the worst times. From the time when Johnny first finds out about his illness, and the likelihood that it would never be cured, Johnny has the strength and courage to go on with his studies and act as if his illness is not affecting him, even if the tumor is worsening. This book shows the struggles and the hardships of a family and their son, who is "slowly being taken by Death," (Johnny's mother, Frances Gunther) while maintaining a positive outlook. Overall, the book was fantastically written and the father and the author, captures every moment of this time in Johnny's life. The book is almost like a series of pictures. John describes everything with such rich detail that I feel that everything could be expressed in a series of photographs.
John Gunther writes "Johnny died at 11:02 P.M. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat-like curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little by little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief, Death took him." This quote shows how much Johnny meant to his family, and later letters sent to his parents showed that the accomplishments Johnny made while he was sick, would surely never be forgotten by the ones he knew and loved with all his heart.
After reading this story, I found myself contemplating the thought of Death stealing me or one I love away. Johnny Gunther not only gives me the strength to go on with life if you loose someone you love but also has become my hero. Hearing about the challenges he faced, and how much of an inspiration he was, I believe that there is no other way to die; to be at peace knowing the your loved ones are safe, and will go on remembering you.
December 13, 2006

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