A candid and humorous tale.
A seasoned traveler’s memoir about his father’s death and the nagging need to make peace with the past.
Flashing back to 1972, when the 7-year-old author was “living with my parents in the worst apartment in a good Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles,” Galaudet launches into a chronicle of his three-decade relationship with his father, an old-school Chicagoan who survived the Great Depression by honing a keen skill of hustling to survive. A big drinker, gambler, and coarse adventurist with few parenting skills, he would disappear and reappear, first for days and weeks, and later years, throughout the author’s life. Despite the absenteeism, Galaudet, who runs the In the Know Traveler websites, clearly respected his father, yearning for his approval and striving to emulate him while nurturing an ongoing love-hate relationship. Fast-forward 20-some years, when the author was a restless, multiskilled, soul-searching adult living temporarily in Las Vegas as a location scout for a boss he hated. One day, Galaudet received a call from Cathy, his father’s most recent wife, who informed him that his dad had suffered a fatal heart attack. He also left a bizarre last wish to have his ashes spread near the seaside village of Cadiz, Spain, while a native speaker sang “Ave Maria” as the soundtrack. “Really,” writes the author, “he wanted to be sent into outer space on a rocket, but he knew that was not going to happen.” So Galaudet was suddenly forced to contend with the past, a project that he shelved indefinitely. Several years later, he finally traveled with his father’s remains in a rucksack, attending a bullfight, visiting cafes, and having conversations with the ashes as he struggled to find closure. With asides spanning the years from his pot-smoking, pill-popping teenage years to his later adult failures as an average American man, this navel-gazing hoot of a memoir rings with themes that will appeal to many readers coming-of-age in the 1970s and ’80s.
A candid and humorous tale.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947856-16-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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