An incomplete yet intriguing account of one woman's daily victories and defeats as she works to keep a New England farm going during the Great Depression. This posthumous memoir by Robertson (190179) was discovered by her daughter. When Adele ``Kitty'' Crockett Robertson's father, a physician, died early in the 1930s, he left his Ipswich, Mass., farm encumbered with debt. Despite discouraging words from her family, the Radcliffe-educated Robertson, alone except for her Great Dane, worked the apple and peach orchards to keep the farm from foreclosure. In this unfinished memoir, Robertson occasionally looks to the past, as when she describes the time her father literally got a bee in his beekeeper's bonnet and was locked out of the house by her mother, who feared he'd bring the angry swarm in with him, or when a Civil War veteran recalled some tantalizing fragments of the farm's history. However, the account focuses mainly on Robertson's own struggles during the years 193234. She copes with a range of pestsfrom an arrogant banker to unscrupulous men who try to steal her apple trees' ``drops'' to destructive aphids and apple maggotsfacing each down with spirit. Despite her own precarious finances and her desire to drive a favorable bargain when selling her producea process she fears and dislikesRobertson refuses to exploit the desperation of the unemployed, paying well the few men she can hire, trusting them, and getting reliable workers in return. Persevering despite chemical burns and insect bites, working with equipment that has to be patched to run, she brings in a splendid 1932 harvest; but this was the Depression, and ``everyone had apples.'' The harsh winter freeze of the following year marks the real beginning of the end for the farm. Despite its fragmentary nature, and the only minimal supporting commentary supplied by the author's daughter, this enjoyable memoir opens another small but valuable window into our past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-4092-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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