A disjointed but amusing collection of childhood memories.
A long collection of short anecdotes about childhood on a Michigan farm.
Weddon (Close Calls on the Farm: Survival of the Funniest, 2013, etc.) continues his series, turning his attention to early childhood. The author brings a conversational tone to 50-plus short accounts of his youthful adventures. Taken together, the author offers a warm view of the American heartland that harkens back to a simpler, more rustic time. Two lifelong loves stand out: farm animals and firearms. The former may prove accessible to a wider audience. He recalls a horned owl with a broken wing that his family nursed back to health. The sections about Weddon’s history with guns are less endearing, but they nonetheless illustrate the rich American dedication to the Second Amendment. In the chapter “My Weapons from Birth to Age Ten,” Weddon fondly remembers, “My first gun was a toy double-barreled cork gun,” before explaining that “by age five, I had grown into cap guns. I had cap revolvers, semiautomatics, rifles, and a red plastic rocket with a metal nosepiece that slammed into a cap on impact.” Whether he’s discussing farm animals, weapons, or general barnyard mischief, Weddon writes with a likable, conversational voice. The vignettes are enjoyably light and sure to please fans of rural Americana. Considered in aggregate, however, they don’t coalesce into a single, overarching narrative. Weddon is a master of the morsel; he delivers bite-sized memories that satisfy a nostalgia for Michigan farm life. But these rarely build off one another, which occasionally gives the memoir a bloated feel. The book would achieve the same effect at half its length.
A disjointed but amusing collection of childhood memories.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6749-0
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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