Recollections in a fresh voice—with sharp teeth.
Journalist and filmmaker Jamison offers a wicked, wonderfully crafted memoir about growing up in California and Oregon amid a nutty, unlovely clan.
As a youth, the author had to navigate a course of survival among the towering, angry personalities who dominated a shaky household. His father was an anti-establishment dreamer who despised the Mormon Church of which his wife was a devout member. He believed in free will above all else, and after he was laid off as a carpenter and had no source of income, he decided that the family would live more nobly from the rich finds of a dumpster. “More trash means less work,” Dad’s system of economy ran. “Less work means . . . just skiing, sledding, igloo building. Food stamps.” Jamison’s irate mother fluctuated alarmingly in weight, gorging secretly to allay her dissatisfaction with her marriage and lying to hide what the author calls her “staggering stupidity.” The older sister was a sadist who often physically tortured her hated siblings and eventually displaced their father, ruling cruelly over Jamison and his younger brother. Once the marriage ended, Mom headed to her Mormon sisters in Oregon, where she rededicated herself to the church. The children were baptized, and Jamison was sent to a camp run by pederast scoutmaster Gary, who duly taught the boys about fornication and how to play strip poker. Eventually, the father returned, but the marriage dissolved. The divorce was followed by the displacement of Mom and the kids to a “shitbox” in town, while her former spouse moved back to California to chase impossible sailing dreams and evade child-support responsibilities. Still, though, the narrator cannot despise his father. His mother might call him a “selfish jerk” who had “nothing to give back,” but what Dad did do was to set his son free, so to speak, in the riches of the imagination.
Recollections in a fresh voice—with sharp teeth.Pub Date: April 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-55652-599-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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