Masterful and mesmerizing; informative, rich, wise, and wonderful.
In his debut work of nonfiction, poet and academic Giscombe (English/Penn. State Univ.) searches for a possible 19th-century ancestor, a Jamaican miner and explorer whose surname, Giscombe, has become `affixed to the geography` of British Columbia.
Giscombe divides his memoir into numerous sections, but one serves as the principal string threading the beads of the myriad memories and musings that comprise this remarkable, moving work. These `Winter in Fort George` sections (Giscombe distributes more than half-a-dozen of them throughout) provide the closest thing to a traditional narrative structure, but even they sometimes wander off into unknown or unexpected territory—just as Giscombe himself is apt to do as he pursues by foot, bicycle, car, train, and airplane his ancestors and his interests, from Jamaica to British Columbia to Cornell to Illinois and Alaska. He writes that he endeavors `to live at some extremity, at places where my mortality might be visible to me.` Giscombe’s search for his obscure ancestor—for the reasons that a town, a rapids, a canyon bear his name—fuels an explosion of words and ideas that traditional organization cannot hope to contain. He moves effortlessly through time, back and forth and back again—each crafted sentence a wave that brings to shore a dazzling bounty of beauty and surprise. Such an array of subjects! From films by Chaplin to jazz by Miles Davis to bears, crocodiles, nighthawks, wolves, and foxes; from Chinese food in remote restaurants to family, race, sex (`Eros is eros, boys, everybody gets to play the fool`), pain, loss, the fraternity of cyclists, the inability of undergraduates to write essays, and meditations on the frailty of his own body (that `portable old site of my being alive`). As he considers the `tribes` that are our families, he concludes that each has `a lot of centers, a lot of stories, a lot of homeplaces and hearts.`
Masterful and mesmerizing; informative, rich, wise, and wonderful.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-86547-541-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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