With not much about sex but a lot about gender, here’s an acute narrative of how the clever Holland came to be so writerly.
Essayist and incidental feminist Holland (They Went Whistling, 2001, etc.) turns septuagenarian and, perforce, autobiographical, recounting the story of her first 18 years.
Caught by the pigtails, Holland’s childhood history recalls the nation’s capital during WWII, when kids were on the alert for Luftwaffe intruders and Nazi spies. It was a time when children had little more than one another for entertainment. Cuisine was standard American white bread. School was an enemy camp, and grownups were a mystery for young Barbara. Mom went barefoot and kept her nose in a book, Grandmother was a Socialist and adept at poker, and siblings were mostly an annoyance. Occupying Dad’s chair was a cold, even terrifying, stepfather. Our author displayed a preternatural attentiveness to her surroundings (as she still does). The knack of reading came to her fully formed, like an epiphany, and so did the writer’s calling. With her considerable analysis, Holland covers every variety of experience from mid-century—her discovery of books, adventurous dreams, powerful hopes and fears, dimwitted teachers, race, war, cursive handwriting, radio and—especially—the inviolable rules of belonging to one’s own gender. Boys ruled. “It was unseemly for a woman of any age to sit on leather,” we learn, “and almost indecent for a girl.” Beyond simple elegiac recollection, Holland’s memoir includes much awareness of rigidly assigned gender-based roles. Eventually, though, this little touch of Grover’s Corners in the night passes. The spirit of Holland’s youth fades away and a solemn, pensive childhood crashes down as this smart coming-of-age text comes to an end. It’s all credible and persuasive, for, as Holland notes, “gelatinous” memory, once written down, “turns to stone, right or wrong, a fact.”
With not much about sex but a lot about gender, here’s an acute narrative of how the clever Holland came to be so writerly.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-525-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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