The life of an immigrant family, reassembled with the contents of one man's study. After the recent deaths of his parents, the task of sorting through his father's copious papers fell to Orlove (Environmental Studies/Univ. of California, Davis). Rather than merely reading the contents, he decided to write a book about them. The result is the story both of Robert Orlove and of his son Ben's research and writing process: the first tentative forays of the son into the father's inner sanctum; Ben's eventual removal of the journals, letters, drawings, and pictures to his own home; the plan he laid out for structuring them into a book. Ben decided that the best way of presenting the study would be to divide it into thematic chapters corresponding to the different material he found. ``Mother-book'' describes a notebook Robert wrote about his mother; ``Brother-mail'' the letters of Robert's inventor- brother. Instead of a linear narrative, Ben treats the reader to a glimpse of what it was like to rummage through Robert's things, coming up with small, oddly shaped pieces of an enormous, incomplete puzzle. The structure is inspired, but it's not matched by Ben's analyses of what he finds. He speculates wildly about the significance of various objects—for example, his mother's sheet music of ``You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby'' suggests to him that she might have been having a flirtation with another man, because its tone is different from the other songs she collected. Ben simply accepts as justified, however, Robert's dislike of his own father, rather than delving further into this complex association. Given the shaky quality of what analysis he does provide, Orlove might have done better to transcribe more and let his readers come to their own conclusions. Like the study itself, some true gems mixed in with a lot of scrap paper. (30 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-87745-490-6
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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