Despite some fine writing and genuinely interesting social history, this exploration of the self through the lens of family...
Everyone’s family history is endlessly fascinating – to them. To avoid boring a non-family member, however, requires either great skill as a storyteller or extremely colorful relatives.
Journalist Weisman (Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, not reviewed), who has contributed to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times magazines, among others, sets himself a daunting task in his multigenerational chronicle of his family’s journey from the Ukrainian shtetl to the Minnesota middle class. To the author’s surprise, this upward march includes innumerable lies that his relatives told to each other and to themselves in order to survive and prosper. The consequences of these lies, both moral and practical, are at the heart of the family saga, which is dominated in the retelling by Weisman’s father: football hero, labor lawyer, political insider, and domestic tyrant. While his relationships with his family make for painful reading, Weisman skillfully conveys how his father’s character was shaped by a profound insecurity that allowed him to achieve traditional success but lessened him as a person. In reaching this insight, Weisman does what we all do when we reach adulthood: see our parents not as unassailable archetypes but as flawed human beings. As the French say, to understand all is to forgive all. Despite his attempt to understand his family heritage, Weisman seems a long way from fully forgiving. There is much unresolved bitterness here and an adolescent instinct to make himself the center of attention. In relating the discovery of his mother’s long-hidden abortion, why else interject: “How fathomless the loss. Because I’d been there.”
Despite some fine writing and genuinely interesting social history, this exploration of the self through the lens of family history is too narrow a subject to sustain this lengthy narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100291-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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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