An entertaining, sometimes affecting memoir of making a home.
It’s the age-old story of residence against man as the author builds his dream house.
Though not a structural engineer like his father, Akron Beacon Journal columnist (and former Beavis and Butt-Head writer) Giffels was seriously into the form of obsession known as do-it-yourself. The decaying old manse on North Portage Path in Akron, Ohio, was composed largely of rot, rust and mold, along with a bit of residual brick. It had all the structural integrity of a house of cards, but it boasted a billiard room. “We knew,” writes the author, implicating his understanding spouse, whose second pregnancy made the move to larger quarters more urgent. “We belonged here.” Of course, funny stuff ensued as ancient lath and plaster gave way to wallboard, rust yielded to pipe, openings in the roof were shingled and the shambles became a home. Giffel’s untethered expectations met human limitations. It was an epic, resolute campaign against ancient wood, copper, mortar and linoleum, against soil, grout and glue, against mice, raccoons and squirrels. Walls spoke secrets, joists told tales and the rafters enclosed stories as well as resident woodland creatures. The author found a cache of antique cash and lost his favorite hammer. Reconstructing that grand old dwelling was a life-changing event and, perforce, a fount of comedy. As he doggedly stripped accretions of paint from door hinges, Giffels uncovered layers of heartfelt meaning. At last report, nearing its centenary, the place on North Portage Path is not finished. The Giffels family is in it, quite happy. The house remains, like the greater world, a place of mortality and of vitality. Life goes on.
An entertaining, sometimes affecting memoir of making a home.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-136286-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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