A toast to Art, who survived serious scrapes with the law, as well as women in tight jeans and pouffed hair, and lived to...
An up-by-his-bootstraps San Jose businessman reflects on his rough-and-tumble California life in the ’60s.
Rodriguez is one tough old bird. He has cranked out a series of books (East Side Dreams, 1999; Forgotten Memories, 2002) after teaching himself to read and write and to work with proper grammar. Sure, his tale of hot-blooded youth has some rough edges and splinters, but he has placed profanity and sex outside the scope of his work, so even youngsters are welcome. Indeed, high-schoolers struggling with reading might find Rodriguez far more engaging than some of the remedial material on the school’s shelves. And those who lived through those roller-coaster years will enjoy the sobering journey back to the era when fights were “rumbles,” few people played with guns (fists were the primary weapons), drugs were an exotic Asian novelty, beer was the most popular intoxicant and gasoline cost 24 cents per gallon. It’s not literature, but Rodriguez’s writing is accessible and painstakingly crafted, and he has the committed storyteller’s knack for details–including a lively description of the layout of a drive-in movie theater. Moreover, it’s apparent that success hasn’t changed him–he remains true to his roots throughout, and presents an admirable tale of genuine Horatio Alger Americana.
A toast to Art, who survived serious scrapes with the law, as well as women in tight jeans and pouffed hair, and lived to entertain us with his tales.Pub Date: June 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-967-1555-4-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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