Poignant, but would have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.
A son searches for insight into his father, who died in 2005, by probing his fascination with the Depression-era Bonus March.
Novelist Langer (Ellington Boulevard, 2008, etc.) is the son of the late Seymour Langer, doctor and dutiful but distant father. The author vividly remembers his father talking about writing, but never completing, a book about the 1932 Bonus March, in which World War I veterans were rousted from Washington, D.C., after demanding early payment of a promised service bonus. Langer dubs the March his father’s “Rosebud,” the mysterious clue hinting at the man’s soul, and he spends most of the book trying to discover why this long-ago event meant so much to his father—did he feel unworthy because he hadn’t served in the military?—meditating on a man he never fully knew and on the meaning of unfulfilled dreams. The author hops around in time, alternating scenes of his childhood, early manhood and the present, as he researches family and friends’ memories of his father while dishing out relevant history about the March. Elements of the story will touch readers with similar experiences, like caring for an aging parent or seeking closure for unresolved parent-child questions. Unfortunately, large sections of the narrative, such as the dead-end leads that Langer pursues, become tedious and self-indulgent. The author concludes that his father was a contented man who may not have wanted to write a book. Indeed, his brother tells him that the uncompleted book probably matters more to him than it did to their dad.
Poignant, but would have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52372-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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