In a bizarre mixture of joint autobiography and sociology, occasionally complemented by detailed instructions on well-drilling, the Covington writer/spouse duo rehashes about 20 years of their stormy, messy married life. The tale of Vicki and Dennis offers no theme of general interest and is perhaps just as trivial or as original as the life story of any random passer-by. The difference here lies in a relatively sophisticated narrative technique that alternates the voices of husband and wife, each of whom in turn provides an individual interpretation of the same events. Vicki’s account is emotionally charged, while Dennis sticks to a more balanced and precise journalistic manner. Natives of Alabama, where they wind up again after several brief sojourns elsewhere, the couple have had a lifestyle mÇlange of hippie and pseudobohemian, which seems to defy their parents’ basic southern values. Drugs, alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and adultery, punctuated by a mÇnage Ö trois with one of Dennis’s fellow college professors, mix to form a pretty nauseating cocktail of the Covingtons’ earlier married life. Just when Vicki’s maternal instinct awakens, she is afflicted with an ectopic pregnancy, years of infertility treatment, eventual pregnancy by her husband’s buddy, and a subsequent abortion. She finally gives birth to two of Dennis’s daughters, their literary careers take off, and their life normalizes to a certain extent, although extramarital affairs remain omnipresent. The Covingtons’ return to the Southern Baptist Church appears as abrupt and unconvincing as their pathetic urge to drill water wells in El Salvador to satiate their “spiritual thirst.” The final chapters of the book feature frequent quotations from the Bible and pop songs, melodramatic talk of forgiveness, and sadomasochistic confessions the two make to each other about their respective lovers. One hopes that the story of the Covingtons’ “crimes and misdemeanors” will prove therapeutic for the authors, as the readers will find it neither edifying nor amusing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-86547-548-2
Page Count: 124
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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