A raucous but also sensitive and insightful view of why the Sunshine State really is different.
The author tracks her Florida family branches back some eight generations as evidence that the state’s history is uniquely and often scandalously strange.
Roberts (English/Univ. of Alabama) roamed Tallahassee as a journalist (St. Petersburg Times, The New Republic, etc.) during the Election 2000 debacle. Fidel Castro, she recalls, offered to send “democracy advisers,” a wisecrack that makes it clear her sympathies did not lie (as did those of some of her relatives) with elections supervisor Katharine Harris, whom the author characterizes as duping the press into seeing her as an airhead handmaiden of the Bush dynasty while coolly administering whatever selective disenfranchisement it would take to get the job done. This sardonic account of the post-election scramble serves as preamble to Roberts’s engrossing portrayal of her native land as both charmed and cursed from the day Ponce de Leon first stumbled ashore to sip from the legendary fountain only to receive an ultimately fatal wound. Florida, she deftly argues, has somehow become everybody’s ultimate “second chance”—mostly in the form of perennially virgin real estate lying prostrate for exploitation. Roberts cites, for example, the legislature’s 1924 prohibition of both income and inheritance taxes, officially inviting the lustful rich to overrun the adventurous poor, who had in their own heyday ethnically cleansed the original Seminole inhabitants. Edgy, sarcastic wit peppers a historical narrative dovetailed, to the occasional point of slipped focus, with ancestral ups and downs. Yet Roberts doesn’t spare her own kin when it comes to a good story: hoop-skirted debutantes as poseurs of the Old Confederacy, KKK yips, moonshiners, and power-brokers on the take dot the assembled genealogical roster. State legislator Luther Tucker, for instance, is tabbed apocryphally as someone who dialed up a hooker in the 1950s from a Tallahassee hotel room to find, on her arrival, that they were related.
A raucous but also sensitive and insightful view of why the Sunshine State really is different.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5206-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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