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HER FATHER

A MEMOIR

The founder of the Pushcart Press and editor of its Pushcart Prize series writes a coming-of-middle-age memoir that gets as intimate as a memoir ought to. Opening with the death of his mother, Henderson recalls life as her son and the son of a father besotted with fundamentalist religion. His reaction, of course, was a bohemian life as an unpublished literary artist intoxicated with words. For this wannabe beat author of the great American novel, life in New York as the '60s turned into the '70s appeared to be one of unbridled venery, with a plentitude of screwing, booze, screwing, drugs, screwing, laughs, and genial copulation. The beau monde is described in a set piece about a visit to a sex palace that is less erotic than plain raunchy (and not particularly helpful to those who still hope for federal funding for the arts). All the while Henderson was yearning for Miss Right. Along with a few near-Miss Rights, he finally met her, and though her name was Annie, she looked a lot like Ellen Burstyn. His blood pressure became elevated. He suffered palpitations. He shipped books from his garage, the early offices of his Pushcart Press, and endured uxorious mishaps as he finally settled down with Annie and a Chesapeake retriever (named Ellen Burstyn). And the reprobate began a reformation. To the couple's eventual delight, Annie became pregnant, and after much prepartum bleeding, graphically reported, she gave birth to a daughter. Henderson rejoices in the evergreen miracle. Now his daughter is 11, and he has returned to a fervent religion of the buttonholing variety. He ends his story with the astonishment, common to every daddy, at the beauty and bravery, the wit and wisdom of his child, his wonderful child. Just this side of bathos, this is a heartfelt and affecting story of a scapegrace who achieved grace through the oldest of marvels, parenthood.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-571-19872-4

Page Count: 164

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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