The brief, years-later section tacked on at the end is insubstantial, following, as it does, the scorched earth of what came...
A childhood you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy: a series of mistakes, tribulations, and brutality, tempered by the sanctuary of an uncle’s farm in the Catskills.
Related in the third person, which affords a modest buffer to the story’s grim terrain, novelist Peck (Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, 1998, etc.) tells of his alcoholic father stealing into his room, which he shared with seven brothers and sisters, in the middle of the night, toothless and giddy on cough syrup, whining (“I owe my troubles to a savage wife”) and slurring that he wants Dale out of the squalor and the thrashings he receives from his mother, administered with a length of hose complete with the metal head. The dairy farm of Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie is no walk in the park, a shambles of an operation—“Dinner, sleep, morning reveille and sixty swollen udders eager to be drained, world without end, amen”—that Peck helps to drive almost insolvent. There are a few shining set pieces here: when Peck embraces a sense of place (“the land, history, time itself, absorbs all the things people forgo and forget”); and again, when a cow nears death as a result of his bungling, when he curls up next to the cow’s belly, warm as a campfire in the winter night, pining for “the body-stuffed bed of his parents’ house,” despite its unspeakable occupants. His ultimate choice of immediate family over the aunt and uncle is mind-boggling, especially after another depiction of his father, crawling around the floor of the family house, thoroughly inebriated, being humiliated by wife and police officers: “Mercy, sir,” the father pleads, and then fouls himself.
The brief, years-later section tacked on at the end is insubstantial, following, as it does, the scorched earth of what came before.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-25128-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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