A mostly well-written book for the author’s family and friends; others may take a pass.
An admiring portrait of the author’s father, who “rose from the lowest rungs of society, mastered the city, and became its King.”
Friedman’s (My Mother’s Side: A Journey to Dalmatia, 2011) title might lead readers to expect a story of a Chicago mayor or another of her great industrialists. However, the author’s father, Dan Friedman, was “a self-described ‘junk man’ whose business, the Associated Salvage Company, was located on the South Side…within a few blocks of the Union Stock Yards, the vast meatpacking district.” He was a man far ahead of his time who made his fortune recycling before it was fashionable. Raising his family on Chicago’s North Shore, he grew to be wildly successful, buying a new black Cadillac Coupe de Ville each year. The author writes of questioning his father’s history; he gained little from the man who never wished to discuss his childhood, insisting he didn’t know how to be a father since he never had one. Friedman also explores his grandfather Sam’s story of immigration and his father’s childhood in an orphanage and difficult upbringing. Like so many immigrants, they were distressed, but family was near, and both his father and grandfather entered mixed marriage with Catholics. Sam died suddenly when Dan was only 1; his wife, destitute, put her children in the Marks Nathan Home, a Jewish orphanage. Dan never forgave his mother for the years he spent there even though his siblings were with him. Memories of the harsh discipline and cruelty were never discussed. Would the possibility his grandfather died of syphilis explain why this woman received no help from her other family members, who all lived in Chicago? Ostensibly about his forebears, the slim narrative is really about the author’s struggles with his Jewishness, although he doesn’t really seem to care much until the end of the book.
A mostly well-written book for the author’s family and friends; others may take a pass.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63144-068-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Carrel/Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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