An emotional demonstration that Humpty Dumpty can be put together again. (Illustrations)
Stylistically innovative memoir of the author’s father, who killed himself in 1974 when she was five.
For her debut, Oliver fashions a form that fits her subject. Because she did not remember her father—indeed, went through most of her life without even being very curious about him—and because he shot himself in a primitive dirt-floor cabin in New Mexico leaving behind very few possessions, she began with a short list of only five specific items that he’d owned or that in some way told part of his story. Hers is a voyage of discovery: she interviewed relatives, cold-called a number of her father’s former acquaintances, visited the sites where he’d lived and died, discovered many old photographs and a pathetic journal with drawings and bad poems as dark as the grave, viewed videos of his 1961 appearance on the G. E. College Bowl representing Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he’d studied to be an architect, a profession he pursued only fitfully. By the end, Oliver’s list of items has grown to 33. She chronicles the dissolution of her parents’ marriage—and her own. (She became romantically involved with one of her father’s former friends.) She rehashes childhood sexual abuse from a beery man her mother was living with. She describes entering therapy. Oliver’s structure is part scrapbook, part narrative, part mosaic, part meta-memoir. She provides snippets of dialogue, old photographs, transcriptions of e-mail, photocopies of pages from her father’s journal, newspaper clippings, drawings—full meals of narrative followed by bite-sized snacks. She also discovers there was much to admire about her father: he was a fine friend; he had a bright, inventive mind; he was attractive and amusing. But when he lost interest in his architecture career, he drifted. At the end, virtually alone near Taos, he was associating with hard people and selling hard drugs.
An emotional demonstration that Humpty Dumpty can be put together again. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-34152-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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