An informative but occasionally too-dry behind-the-scenes look into the funeral industry and its reflection on contemporary...
A young woman makes a life out of working with death.
Working for an undertaker doesn't seem like it would be a popular choice for a summer job, but 15-year-old Booker (I Am the Poem, 2011, etc.) a writer, poet and photographer, figured if she were going to learn how to cope with the recent death of her beloved aunt, a funeral home might be the best place to do it. So began Booker's nine-year employment in the office of Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. During her time there, Booker greeted hundreds of grieving inner-city families at the door and witnessed the strange and familiar faces of death. Some of them were her peers, gunned down in the tragic street violence plaguing that part of the country. Others were AIDS patients, suicide victims or elders in the church; the only discernible pattern that surfaced in the Wylie clientele was a desire for closure. Booker writes that she felt as though she “had already died a hundred deaths” by the time she was done working at the funeral home. By including plenty of less-heavy details about family life at the home and insights into an industry that most outsiders never consider until they have to, Booker's memoir remains mostly lighthearted and true to a teenage girl's perspective. With death as a backdrop, she fell in love with the funeral director's son, crashed the hearse and struggled with the illness of her mother. Despite the rich material, however, the writing reaches neither a moving depth nor comic height and feels at times as stiff and cold as the bodies in the embalming room.
An informative but occasionally too-dry behind-the-scenes look into the funeral industry and its reflection on contemporary society in inner-city Baltimore.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-592-40712-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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