Childers’s very specific portrait of a time and place makes for a valuable piece of social history, as well as a potent...
Clear-eyed coming-of-age story traces the author’s girlhood in the Bronx of the 1950s and ’60s, and her iron determination to claw her way out of the system.
Childers was born into a large Irish Catholic family: one mother, several absent fathers and numerous half sisters. The pope’s position on birth control meant that Childers’s mother, Sandy, would never abort a child, and her drinking, loneliness and poor impulse control kept the Childers clan ever increasing. The author reports on the many small moments that added up to her unhappy childhood. There were the nights of searching for her mother in the bar and the days she had to fight to attend school rather than baby-sit the younger children. And there was the growing instability of the world outside. Crammed into a small apartment in one of the few neighborhoods they could afford, the Childers girls (and later one boy) had a front-row seat for watching the crumbling of the Bronx. In her dry, clear voice, the author reports on the growing crime, the flight of white neighbors and the racial tensions that played out in school and on the streets. It’s clear that this sense of distance came at a cost to Childers: The day she left for college, her mother told her she might as well never come back. These tangled family relations, the tensions of wondering how the latest financial crisis can be solved, Sandy’s raffish but undeniable appeal, the author’s slow but inevitable escape from her family’s undertow, the difficulty of seeing her less determined siblings going under—it all makes for raw, magnetic reading. The close, however, a brief commentary on social class, is a jarring and unnecessary addendum to an eloquent work.
Childers’s very specific portrait of a time and place makes for a valuable piece of social history, as well as a potent personal tale.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-586-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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