A moving period saga with the ring of truth to it.
An orphaned girl lives through 90 years of social and familial upheaval in this haunting fictionalized biography.
When smallpox carries off her brother, father and beloved mother Jencey in 1874, seven-year-old Lizzie Murphy is left with a void in her heart and a clouded future. Fortunately, the town of Miami, Mo., takes care of its own. Lizzie finds a loving home with a local judge, is romanced by a charming rogue who runs off to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and marries the seemingly more reliable lawyer John Casebolt. Alas, her husband proves a shiftless, egotistical bigot who repeatedly raids Lizzie’s meager savings to finance hare-brained, get-rich-quick schemes. (Fraudulent diamond mines are a perennial temptation). Lizzie’s life is shaped by the constraints imposed on women in a sexist society, but not shackled by them–fleeing in a Model T, the feisty heroine divorces John, opens a boarding house, sends her daughter Myrtle to college and holds fast to her feminist and progressive principles. Hendry, Lizzie’s now-deceased granddaughter and herself a character in the story, fleshes out Lizzie’s real-life adventures with invented scenes and dialogue that display a sharp eye for character and historical setting. The tumultuous narrative subsides a bit when Lizzie retires and moves in with Myrtle’s growing brood. There’s not much plot in the second half of the book–work, school, vacations, the antics of young children and everyday anxieties about the Depression and World War II fill the pages. But Hendry’s clear homespun prose invests her clan’s history with real pathos. As Lizzie ponders her life and the lives of loved ones, the leaps of faith young people make and the regrets old people feel, Hendry reminds readers of the quiet drama that plays out in every ordinary family.
A moving period saga with the ring of truth to it.Pub Date: May 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-41044-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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