Enough ache here to fill more than a lifetime, albeit with reconciliation at the end and a “father who wondered at the...
Like father, like son. Newspaperman Sheehan’s potent memoir finds a lot of unfortunate parallels between his own and his father’s lives: drinking gone sour, marriages abandoned, a furious pursuit of freedom that turned both remote, then solitary.
Sheehan always remembers running after the love of his father. George was a doctor, son of a New York Irish doctor, who worked dawn to dark to get beyond what he saw as the confines of his heritage. He was an absence to his 12 children, and Andrew, smack in the middle, acutely felt the lack of attention. Sheehan tries to get a grasp of the situation by exploring how his father’s sense of insecurity and inadequacy might have made him unapproachable. The two shared time together, but never enough. And there was alcohol: “Even in temperate Irish households, alcohol was always a presence, a specter from the past kept at bay, in hope that if no one acknowledges it, the beast will just someday roll over and die.” For neither man was it so temperate. Worse still, when George gained fame as a running guru in the 1960s, he started to pursue women, forsaking his family. His mother would always accept him back, but after he had entered into the family’s midst, he would take what he wanted and then leave again. Sheehan follows along in his father’s footsteps: a runner, a writer, an escaper from responsibility and from his own emotional life. As the son gathers the rubble of his life, George discovers he has inoperable prostate cancer. He wakes up to the glory of his family, and the pages devoted to this time are heartbreaking in their beauty and unadorned brevity.
Enough ache here to fill more than a lifetime, albeit with reconciliation at the end and a “father who wondered at the beauty of his son and could claim no influence.”Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33561-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
