A sluggish book that presents a choir director’s history, career, and faith.
A debut memoir in poems, prose, and songs shows how Christianity helped one man navigate life.
Growing up in the Pennsylvania Dutch region in the 1930s, Fox lived on a “mini-farm” with few modern conveniences. Throughout his childhood, he endured some moderate bullying from the neighborhood kids and strict teachers whose punishments could not exist today: on an instructor’s desk “rested a Ping-Pong paddle, which she used upon my seat of understanding.” But the biggest challenge coming from his formative years was a belief that he was not very intelligent. Despite this challenge, an appreciation for music and a deep passion for the Bible propelled him through high school and into a Bible college. Through several false starts and setbacks, Fox always trusted that his life was merely going according to God’s plan, and he eventually found a career as a high school English teacher and started a family with his wife, Joy. After the difficult years of raising their children, Fox discovered his original two passions coming back together with the offer to become the choir director for his church in 2009, giving him the opportunity to further share both Jesus and music with others. Scattered throughout the memoir are poems and original songs by the author that range from sweet to oddly literal: “A yellow jacket nest was located, where I sat. / They stung me all over-just like that. / My good parents, knew I was afraid, / And rapidly gave me first aid.” Aside from some intriguing tidbits on bygone ways of life in the ’30s and fascinating reflections on society’s changes, the memoir trudges from one standard life event to the next. Fox writes passionately and earnestly about his devotion and continued belief in Christianity, but most of his recollections are dull and leave the reader wondering why they were necessary to include at all, like the New York City trip when he was separated briefly from some friends: “A terrible fear occurred in my mind,” he writes. “What if they couldn’t find where we were located? Fortunately, that did not happen.” Unfortunately, poems and prose that report on common and uninteresting events drag the entire account down.
A sluggish book that presents a choir director’s history, career, and faith.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1989-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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