British poet and literary editor of the Sunday Independent, Morrison records in stark and beautiful prose the ugly details of his father's slow death from stomach cancer. To the embarrassment of his wife and children, Dr. Arthur Morrison impatiently cut ahead in lines, delighted in beating the ticket-taker at the racetrack or golf course, and, a zestful do-it- yourselfer, pinched pennies on building a new house or putting in the garden. His son dreaded camping trips: Ill-planned, they usually ended at the nearest pub, his father chatting up the locals and, as was his habit, drinking far too much. The mystery of his decades-long relationship with ``Aunt'' Beaty—a ``friend'' of the family scarcely tolerated by Mummy—remains a nagging question. Yet when his father takes sick at age 75, the most disturbing thing is to see him depressed: ``I want him to be dead rather than die like this.'' Morrison doesn't spare the reader, or himself, any intimate or unpleasant detail of the sickness: the ``railway track'' stitched on his father's bloated belly; his inability to urinate and the current state of his penis; the smells and stains on the bedclothes. When he dies, ``he is dead—no rage against the dying of the light, no terror or delirium, only a night-light smothered in its own wax.'' Then, morbidly, the author repeatedly examines the corpse as it lies at home awaiting cremation. Morrison, who admits to becoming a ``death bore'' to his friends, has a purpose in relating all this: He heartrendingly pins down ``the last moment when [his father] was still unmistakably there,'' that last instant before illness transformed his robust, idiosyncratic father into a sick, dying old man. At times wretchedly disturbing, but resurrected by Morrison's graceful writing and eloquent frankness.
Pub Date: June 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13023-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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