A memoir of growing up in a small Southern town during the Great Depression and World War II by doctor and author Meador (Fascinomas, 2013).
After attending the funeral of John Sherling, one of his two best boyhood friends, Meador realized that the story of his youth in Greenville, Alabama, might be interesting to his descendants, and to general readers. Growing up, he says, he was unaware that some of the people he knew—cross-dressing Juan Carlos, intellectually challenged “Frog,” mother-daughter prostitute team Louise and Pearl, fearless prankster Leon, and his two best friends, Sherling and Charles Chambliss—would be unique characters anywhere, let alone in tiny Greenville, where people were categorized by religion, gas brand preference and men’s-club membership. Some aspects of Greenville life, however, were not at all unique for a Southern town, including the acceptance of racial segregation and the contrast between city and country life. Meador tells the unvarnished truth about his adolescence; he doesn’t try to inflict 21st century sensibilities on his youth, nor does he attempt to prove that his beliefs were significantly different from those of other Alabamians of the time. His younger self’s burgeoning teenage libido also receives extensive attention. At times, however, the book’s remembrances seem emotionally detached, whether due to the passage of years or a deliberate choice. For example, the book mentions the loss of the author’s mother to colon cancer merely as background to other stories, and as the reason he and his father began taking meals at Mrs. Riley’s boardinghouse, when her death was likely a huge, watershed moment in the family’s life. To his credit, however, Meador resists giving in to the nostalgic conceit that life was better when he was young.
A solid, if not emotionally insightful, memoir for fans of stories of the American South, the Great Depression and the homefront of World War II.
Pub Date: June 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499174397
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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