Poet and playwright Sherborne displays a sharp, sardonic voice.
A rural, coming-of-age memoir set in New Zealand, featuring a dairy farm and feckless parents.
Leaving urban Australia for a spread of 300 acres in the environs of Taonga (pop. 3,000), young Sherborne, with Dad (“The Duke”) and Mom (“Feet”), embarked on a life envisioned suitable for the distinguished landed gentry they planned to become. The Duke was self-important, Feet was a serious snob and their artistic scion, an only child who could accurately mimic Elvis and Nat King Cole, was as bewildered and self-centered as any adolescent. The author, putative heir to the property grandly named Tudor Park, tried to tame a pugnacious horse trainer and deal with an irascible cowhand and his surly son. It was, after all, a place for future generations, even though the neighbors were commonplace folk, far beneath the civilized owners of Tudor Park. The locals were slobs, and the cows are simpletons. So reports the author, in the mode of a Down Under version of Holden Caulfield—indeed, Sherborne was chosen to play the lead in his school’s musical version of Catcher in the Rye. As the growing teenager took it all in, rubbing the soil of the farm into his pores, The Duke taught his son about shaving and manliness, while Feet ranted constantly and gradually lost her sanity. In a distinctive, simultaneously caustic and funny style, the author writes poetically about family matters, adolescence, the farming life and “the pull of history.”
Poet and playwright Sherborne displays a sharp, sardonic voice.Pub Date: June 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-33790-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
