There’s not a lot of art here, but there’s plenty of heart and intelligence.
A memoir of life in the “lowest part of Louisiana…arguably the wettest, wildest, and freest part of the country.”
Lourd, now an investment banker in Los Angeles, grew up in a place so remote that even his Cajun neighbors called it “the country,” a bit of raised land in the middle of the world’s largest freshwater swamp, pieces of which had been sold over the years to pay off gambling debts. The author’s father, muscle car at the ready and beer can in hand, had a few such debts himself. “Dad was a betting man, like his father before him,” Lourd writes, and a born salesman who understood that the key to being successful is to roll with the punches when rejection arrives, as it always does. The author writes with affection and sympathy for his father, his mother, and the ways of the South, from pulling on a cold beer with professional wrestling blaring in the background to tearing down a dirt road in a “1972 purple-and-black Dodge Super Bee Charger.” Yet, if all men seek to understand their fathers, all boys have to break away from them at some point or another. Lourd’s break had the usual fraught qualities, with a few twists of fate along with a few bittersweet words of wisdom along the way. The author, suffice it to say, survived his sentimental education, and some of his notes are solid. He writes affectingly of boys looking for guidance to men who were lost, weren’t sure of the way, or “instinctively held to the truth that trudging through the fertile, teeming marsh of life was path enough.” However, some of the book seems like a cross between Dr. Phil and The Dukes of Hazzard as filtered through a country song (“Dad was drunk and I watched him sway”).
There’s not a lot of art here, but there’s plenty of heart and intelligence.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7385-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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