It’s difficult to lose a parent, let alone write about the loss. Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with...
An award-winning poet revisits the suicide of his father.
Forhan (English/Butler Univ.; Ransack and Dance, 2013, etc.) was 14 when his middle-age father, Ed, the head of finance for Alaska Lumber and Pulp, went into the carport of the family’s home, ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his car to the driver’s window, and lay down across the front seat. The author’s mother, Ange, discovered her husband the next morning. Forty years later, when Forhan reached the age at which his father died, he realized that his father is only “a scattering of fragments.” So he decided to track down anyone who could help him understand why Ed would have chosen, without a word of warning, to abandon his wife and eight children. The resulting memoir is a poignant exploration of Ed’s strict Catholic upbringing, his problems with diabetes, and, once he became a father, his increasingly erratic behavior—slipping up at work, staying out all night, incurring gambling debts. The book also charts Forhan’s maturity, from his years as a Boy Scout to his early TV news career and growing doubts about Catholicism. The book’s main flaw is that Ed often isn’t at the center of the story and thus feels at times like a supporting player. These absences, coupled with long digressions on more mundane events—such as the free koi Forhan received from a radio station or the tourist sites his family visited on a trip to Disneyland—dilute the book’s power. But there are still many affecting scenes here, especially of the author finding solace in poetry and his discovery that a poem can communicate “a sense of openness, of receptive attention to a life that enchants and baffles.”
It’s difficult to lose a parent, let alone write about the loss. Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3126-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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