A focused, intelligent exploration of a parent's betrayal, leading to the hard-won discoveries that constitute the author's own ongoing education of the heart. When Corbett's physician-father abandoned his wife, his medical practice, his dog, and his Connecticut home in 1965, he also left behind two grown sons. The note Corbett Sr. left tacked to the door said, ``I have gone to further my education.'' This cold fact opens the book and permeates every page. As he fled the country, the good doctor left a further cryptic message with the author's wife, Beverly, saying that ``things aren't what they seem.'' Poet and essayist Corbett (Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir, not reviewed), a lecturer in writing at MIT and poetry editor of Grand Street, here employs an appealingly plain style to describe his efforts to delve into the mystery of his father's life and relations. He realizes that his father was for some reason unable ultimately to love. ``That adhesion that bonds parent to child, that inexplicable surge of love for your own flesh and blood . . . must not have taken between my father and me. Or this bond weakened during his years at war,'' writes Corbett, who in reconstructing his father's story also traces his own emotional and literary development, including his admittedly formless and overwritten early attempts to narrate this difficult material. Corbett patiently and lucidly dissects the triangle of affections and hesitancies he formed with his parents, now both deceased. He effectively captures the mood of tragicomedy surrounding family members in the days immediately following his father's leaving, and artfully details the ensuing strains of his relationship with his mother. The son's insights seem to issue, finally, as much from revealed history as from his own gift for thoughtful self- examination undertaken over the years. These insights are expressed in an understated narrative exhibiting great clarity, perspective, and order.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-944072-74-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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