Young-adult readers will enjoy the memorable characters in Bailey’s fictionalized memoir about her small-town childhood in segregated 1950s Kentucky.
In her debut, Bailey offers a sweeping look at a life gone by, through rich portraits of the residents in her fictionalized hometown of Lakeville. Her well-written reflections reveal the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of human nature, and a few are notable for highlighting the tremendous human capacity for fairness and generosity. This is a nontraditional memoir, as the author focuses on the lives of others to highlight a parable that she associates with biblical scripture. Throughout the book, she writes dialogue in Southern vernacular, yet somehow sidesteps sounding hokey. Her most telling story is “A Fine One,” which begins: “Old people said there were good white people and bad white people, and good black people and bad black people.” It goes on to describe how members of her community, black and white, united to rebuild a home for African-American Earl Roy, despite the town’s segregation policy; however, they failed to assist others they deemed unworthy of assistance. Another story chronicles the missteps of Banty, the town’s bootlegger, who “was supposed to know Coffman County the way a man would learn the lines on his own face just by shaving every morning.” However, after reflecting on Banty’s life, the author weakly concludes, “Sometimes people do evil and you just have to learn to live around them.” Many readers may recoil at the book’s outmoded terms for race, or will be disappointed by how much is left unsaid. They may also wonder why the author doesn’t take sides on some clear injustices. That said, Bailey ultimately provides readers with a tenable view of how her “village” raised her. As such, the book is at once nostalgic, sad and illuminating.
An often engaging look at the daily lives of those in a thankfully bygone era.
Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490828701
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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