A son’s loving and determined quest to discover the mother he never knew—the young woman who died, at 19, shortly after giving birth to her twin sons. Beyond these harsh and tragic facts, Peggy remained a mystery to novelist and memoirist Snyder (The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Lost Job and a Found Life, 1997, etc.) for nearly 50 years. Then, coming to terms with his father’s rapidly declining health and powers of memory, Snyder was gripped with an overpowering need to understand who his mother was. From photographs, conversations with relatives and friends, and some genuine detective work, this volume was born. It’s Snyder’s gift to his ailing father, to his mother (the girl his father loved), and to all people “in love, or out of it, or trying to stay in love” with the person they have pledged themselves to. It is, ultimately, a gift to himself—an urgent reminder of the need to cherish his own family. Re-creating one parent’s love story and discovering the inner life of a 19-year-old woman one never knew can be an intimidating task in the best of circumstances. Snyder faced additional obstacles. Peggy kept her feelings to herself, shared her father’s dark moods, and died of uncertain causes. By dint of careful research and plain good luck, Snyder discovers the true cause of his mother’s death—preeclampsia—and her fatal sacrifice in delivering her babies. By entering into his mother’s world with the eye of a writer and the determination of a man possessed, Snyder discovers the vulnerable young woman who found unquestioned love with his father. Of Time and Memory is not so much a biography as a “story.” One has to suspend disbelief when the narrative re-creates scenes that the author could only have invented, but then imagination must play a role in telling any love story. At his best, Snyder offers poignant glimpses into everyday family situations, reminding us of the love present in our own lives. A bittersweet story.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40408-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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