Heartbreak at its most bittersweet.
An Irish singer/songwriter’s powerful debut memoir about growing up at the notorious Artane Industrial School for orphaned and abandoned boys in Dublin.
When Ellis began writing the lyrics for his 2009 album, “800 Voices,” he found himself unexpectedly overwhelmed by memories of his years at the Artane school for boys, an institution known for mistreating its unfortunate charges. He was just 8 years old when his alcoholic mother left him with the priests who ran Artane. She told her son she would take him home one day; instead, she left for England with a lover and never returned. In a story that alternates between his successful present and harrowing past, Ellis details how he survived the years of savagery at the hands of the school’s sadistic, whip-wielding priests to become a critically acclaimed musician. A combination of street-honed canniness and steadfast friendships with other boys saved him from the at-times bloody extremes of physical victimization. But it was the Artane Boys Band that saved his soul and gave him a place to express the anger, pain and confusion that roiled inside his “fighting Dublin heart.” A priest encouraged him to take up the trombone, an instrument on which Ellis was able to hone his gift for music. By the time he was 15, his skill and talent attracted the attention of a respected Irish musician who helped the young trombonist get work on the Irish show-band circuit after he left Artane. That Ellis uses the narrative to unearth a deliberately forgotten past makes for compelling reading. But what makes his work even more affecting is the way he uses his story to liberate the voices of otherwise forgotten children who endured “one of the most abusive and brutal institutions in Ireland.”
Heartbreak at its most bittersweet.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61145-892-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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