The evocative autobiography of an actress born and bred in Johannesburg, whose mother found fulfillment in teaching her daughters—and other daughters of South Africa—the traditional dances of Scotland. As the book begins, ``Miss McKirdy lives with her three daughters . . . in a dutch-gabled house on the outskirts of Johannesburg.'' Miss McKirdy had declined to take her husband's name, but was married to a fellow Scot who had immigrated to South Africa. Daddy was a drunk, and Mummy coped by training her daughters and others' to be champions of Highland dance and by teaching elocution at a Roman Catholic convent school. Author Kinghorn was the youngest of the dancing daughters, preceded by Jilly, nicknamed China because of her china-doll complexion, and Annie, born on a Sabbath ``bonny and bright and good and gay.'' As Barbara tells the tale, she was neither the prettiest nor the most appealing dancer, but like her mother, she was a survivor, winning the South African dance championship, marrying, and moving to England, where for a period she worked with her husband as a couple in service, cleaning bathrooms and furtively picking flowers from the master's garden. Barbara goes on to become a successful actress, but she loses her family, and her country, in one tragedy after another. Annie simply disappears from a mental hospital, although Barbara tries to track her through a series of psychics, and Jilly dies of a cancer for which her Christian Science religion offered no palliative. Daddy dies when the last of his secret supply of drink is gone, and Mummy/Miss McKirdy dies of old age. Replete with compelling detail, this is a story of the magnetism of South Africa, of a troubled but tightly knit family, and of a woman who graduated from self-absorption to self- awareness in the swirling world of the theater.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14016-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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