Gifford's baffling but enjoyable memoir of his father, a Chicago bookmaker and hoodlum, is stitched together with material from his earlier books and, admittedly, ``contains elements of fiction'' and is ``somewhat embroidered and colored.'' It's not always easy to discern the factual from the apocryphal, but novelist Gifford's (Baby Cat-Face, 1995, etc.) lively material makes that beside the point: Rudy Winston, owner of the Lake Shore Liquor and Drug Store at the corner of Chicago and Rush streets, was a fascinating, elusive character. Rudy ``was a good man to know,'' as they said. During the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, he had connections to everybody from John Dillinger to Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. Willie ``The Hero'' Nero and Johnny Reata, a man reputed to have made his money running guns to the Dominican Republic, were among his known associates. His own rap sheet was fairly modest, the worst being a one-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to the receipt of stolen goods. Gifford writes of all this in short takes, with some pieces scarcely mentioning his father, focusing instead on his oft-married mother (she divorced Rudy when Gifford was five years old); or his ``listening to the news'' on the radio, i.e., ``the real news of blues, jazz and R&B''; or his penchant for telling wild stories as a child. Gifford catalogues his own set of misfit associates: Cueball Bluestein, who became a hitman for Dodo Saltimocca; Chuck Syracuse, a teenage cab driver who torched his own taxi so the dispatcher couldn't read the meter; Magic Frank, with whom he spent time at Bebop's Pool Hall. But mostly, it's about a father who took him to ball games and the fights, or brought him along on the occasional mysterious trip to small town to ``see a man on business.'' Perhaps appropriately, Gifford riffles through these images of his ``phantom'' father as if they were old photographs of someone he scarcely knew.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100250-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
PERSPECTIVES
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