An overlong yet compassionately written ancestral homage.
A 19th-century poet and social reform advocate’s fruitful life is reanimated by her great-great-granddaughter.
After her father passed away in 2001, Colorado native Brudigam (An Intimate Look at Glenwood Springs Circa 1957, 2011) scrutinized the historical research provided by encouraging relatives and penned the comprehensive, serpentine biography of her great-great-grandmother Adeline “Addie” Lucia Ballou. In 1844, Addie was a 6-year-old growing up in a crowded cottage with her staunch Methodist Episcopalian parents and four siblings in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. As a young girl, the fearless Addie could see light emanating from people and “impatient and demanding spirits” spoke to and physically nudged her, urging the girl to assist them. Years of sorrow followed after the unexpected death of little sister Polly and the subsequent death of her mother, though a posthumous spectral vision from Polly had warned Addie about their mother’s passing. Her father Alexander not only dismissed many of Addie’s ethereal occurrences as shadows in the moonlight, but hastily remarried and Addie’s new stepmother (the first of several) raised the family with hushed primness as women’s movements and anti-slavery rallies emerged, such as those spearheaded by abolitionist Abigail Kelly Foster. Brudigam descriptively charts Addie’s vigorous coming-of-age after the family moved to bucolic Wisconsin and her interest in spiritualism flourished. As a teenager, Addie married Albert, a town official, started a family, courted a budding interest in poetry and, in the midst of the tumultuous Civil War, became a nurse. Ballou’s life, as creatively reinvigorated by distant relative Brudigam, forms a meandering chronicle of events and imagined dialogue where the author has taken great literary license in the reconstruction of conversations and occurrences. The result is a fitting tribute to a vibrant, outspoken woman consumed with her love for family and artistic expression.
An overlong yet compassionately written ancestral homage.Pub Date: April 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456474522
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
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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