A flat, meandering account of the changing fortunes of a South Carolina plantation family, from Bresee, who earlier wrote of his childhood as son of the plantation's dairy manager in Sea Island Yankee, 1986. Using the Lawtons, proprietors of a James Island plantation directly across from Charleston's historic Battery, to illustrate the upheavals experienced by the southern planter class, Bresee traces the family history from the consolidation of cotton-farming lands, through harrowing wartime dislocation, to an eventual switch to dairy production prior to the land's yield to suburban sprawl. The heart of the book, recounted with considerable sympathy for proud and bewildered people ``trapped in a system not of their own making,'' is the Civil War, as family-head Wallace feverishly moves his entire operation first to Beaufort, then to Georgia, then back, rebuilding and torturously readjusting with each wrenching step. Along the way he acquires a rather reluctant 16-year-old bride in his distant cousin Cecilia, and somehow retains the loyalty and devoted service of former slave Peter Brown. Relying largely on two potentially rich sources, Cecilia's diary, and the recollections of Peter Brown as told to the author's father, Bresee creates a drab, anecdotal narrative—filled with ill-timed digressions to his own youth and little outside historical perspective—that reads more like an introduction to a book than a finished product. Nevertheless, the Civil War material, particularly Cecilia's vivid accounts of such horrors as putrefying corpses by the roadside (``everywhere the loathsome buzzard circled slowly above or perched gloatingly on his unresisting prey''), is often riveting, and the picture of people bravely coping with the dissolution of their way of life undeniably poignant. Possibly of some local interest, with the diaries likely worthy of further study. (Twelve pages of photographs.)
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1992
ISBN: 0-945575-55-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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