Greer’s mellifluous work should introduce her to new readers.
A lyrical, mannered memoir in which the American-British playwright and novelist returns to the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in a poor, segregated neighborhood.
Most of Greer’s work (Langston Hughes: the Value of Contradiction, 2011, etc.) was produced after her move to England in 1986 and thus is not well-known on this side of the Atlantic. In her beautifully wrought yet occasionally meandering narrative, the author taps back into the poor, hardworking spirit of her parents, very much the products of the Great Migration from the South after the turn of the century, and the rampant and stifling discrimination that also prevailed in Chicago as she grew up. She writes poignantly of her factory-worker father, who was raised in Jim Crow Mississippi only to endure the added humiliation of serving in the Army during World War II when German prisoners of war were treated better than black servicemen; and her light-skinned mother, self-described as “a little piece of leather that’s well put together,” who became a housewife and bore seven children—Greer being the eldest. They were working poor, able to attend Catholic school and move to a house of their own on the South Side. Observing her beautiful mother exhausted and restricted to the home gave Greer a good idea of what she did not want to do with her life. She tried studying law and was always writing, but she did not have the confidence to assert herself during the tumultuous period of her university years in Chicago, when Black Power was gathering strength. She had affairs with professors and white men and found a family among a welcoming gay community she calls “the Boys.” She ends with her move to New York City at age 30.
Greer’s mellifluous work should introduce her to new readers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1909807624
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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