A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.
Béchard (Vandal Love, 2006) comes to terms with the painful legacy of his father, a suicide at 56.
At first, the author’s portrait of his childhood in British Columbia seems yet another snapshot of a dysfunctional family. Dad, reckless and macho, was always beating people up and getting visits from the police; he fought constantly with Mom, who eventually took the kids and returned to her native Virginia. By that time the author was 10, torn between admiration for his father’s swaggering and fear of its consequences, André, as his wife and children called him, had assumed many names since leaving his French-Canadian family in provincial Quebec and embarking on a criminal career that included bank robbing and jail time. He went straight after he married but remained angry and conflicted, often telling Deni “you’re like me” and seeming to half-want his son to take up his old lawless life. Béchard, who initially hated school but loved to read and yearned to write novels, didn’t know what to make of his father’s mixed signals or his own mixed feelings. His memoir gains power and clarity from the author’s searching, scrupulously honest chronicle of a lengthy process of alternating alienation and reconciliation. Against considerable financial and emotional odds, Béchard entered college in Virginia. This act of defiance won him André’s grudging respect and launched a series of late-night, long-distance conversations in which the elder Béchard mused over his turbulent life while the younger took notes and promised to write his father’s stories. After years of refusing to discuss his origins, in their last phone call André gave his son his birth name and the names of his mother and hometown. Two years after his death, the author went to Quebec and confronted the roots of his father’s malaise, in some ways preordained by family dynamics and yet fundamentally self-chosen.
A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-57131-331-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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