Most of what readers might find new or intriguing concerns the process of corpse removal.
A conventional coming-of-age memoir within a morbidly unconventional context.
Amid the usual accounts of indie-rock obsession and adolescent sexual frustration, this memoir has more than its share of mysteries to resolve. The first is what exactly Meredith’s father did to lose his college teaching job—something involving sexual improprieties with at least one female student (but not more directly addressed until the memoir’s end and never totally clarified). The second is how the author, once a promising student and athlete, has ended up working with his dad part-time removing the bodies of the recently deceased from their homes. “People ask how I got into the funeral business, the underlying implication seeming to be, Why would you possibly choose it?” he writes. “The answer is that I had not yet developed any choosing skills. I was a broke dummy just as startled as anyone else to find myself picking up bodies.” In between descriptions of his work life—how the bodies felt, how bad some of them smelled—Meredith describes how things weren’t much livelier at home, where his mother stayed with his father despite the scandal but refused to talk to him for more than a decade. Ultimately, everyone moved on, mother and father and sister as well as the author, who finally graduated after continually flunking out of college and earned the MFA that led to this debut. There was also a break from the death business, when the author worked in Beverly Hills, which featured memorable (for him) encounters with the likes of Angelina Jolie but where “crushed Sprite cans were touched more lovingly that year than were my genitals.” Meredith eventually came to terms with his father, with himself and with the possibility of making a deeper connection with live bodies than with dead ones.
Most of what readers might find new or intriguing concerns the process of corpse removal.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6121-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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