A superior and wise memoir: The old writer’s mechanical functions may be failing, but his ability to tell a story clearly,...
An autobiographer records the adventure of his own aging.
Now in the midst of his eighth decade, Murray (English/Univ. of New Hampshire) relives a lifetime filled with love and tragedy, struggle and triumph—in many ways not an unusual story. He endured a cramped, unhappy youth, the only child of peculiarly unloving and inept parents. School was miserable. A WWII paratrooper and military policeman, he took part in the Battle of the Bulge. The graphic descriptions of the carnage are among the most powerful parts of his text, and, after more than half a century, the author seems still not quite discharged from the scenes of war. Tragedy intruded even upon Murray’s peacetime world, through the death of his beloved daughter. With such a history, it’s little surprise that the author’s story resembles something that might be uttered on an analyst’s couch—but it is somewhat strange to hear Murray fret that he has presented one self to the world, while living another life in secret. His account becomes universal and ultimately sustaining in the end. He discusses such matters as the geriatric habit of accumulating stuff (and more stuff), the shame and management of incontinence, and the health problems (including diabetes, depression, Parkinson’s, and heart disease) that one may pick up across the years. Throughout it all, Murray is sustained by (and sustains) his wife, who is his comrade in the battle against burgeoning illnesses. They watch each other with an intimacy and compassion that will be a revelation to those of a younger generation.
A superior and wise memoir: The old writer’s mechanical functions may be failing, but his ability to tell a story clearly, thoughtfully, and forcefully is intact as he sends a report from a country foreign to most readers.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43690-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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