A sleek, delightful collection.
A poet and fiction writer delivers 52 “micro-memoirs”—some just one sentence, some a couple of pages—that offer insight into her life, the lives of loved ones, and the overall human condition.
Fennelly (Unmentionables: Poems, 2008, etc.), the former poet laureate of Mississippi, mostly avoids identifying names in the essays—which were previously published in a variety of venues, including Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and the Oxford American—but sometimes it is obvious whom she is referencing or addressing. Five of the essays scattered throughout the slim book carry the title “Married Love” and refer to her husband, novelist Tom Franklin. Other essays refer directly to the author’s children or her parents. Irreverence abounds, as evidenced in the acknowledgements, in which Fennelly thanks her mother by name before adding that she “affirms me daily in many loving ways, as she has done from the start, despite noting that ‘This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.’ ” Some of the essays indeed refer to sex but mostly with humor or melancholy. Self-deprecation appears throughout, as well; Fennelly never takes herself too seriously. Other subjects include the author’s doubting of Catholicism, the residents of Oxford, Mississippi, where she lives, and her years as a student. The title essay, previously published in the Southern Review, begins with a service call from an HVAC repairman and then touches on a variety of other topics, including poetry, babies, cookies, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Although the concept and structure of the book are experimental, on the whole, the writing is more straightforward, lucidly composed, and often highly evocative. In “A Reckoning of Kisses,” she writes, “he placed his beer on the pool’s lip, then pulled me into his. I’ll wager that, on the scale of kiss-taste, a freshly-smoked Marlboro followed by a swig of Bud in a forbidden pool in the chlorinated dark still ranks pretty high.”
A sleek, delightful collection.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60947-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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