An outspoken dad’s brassy, wise and painfully honest view from the top of the family tree.
The pride and pitfalls of contemporary fatherhood.
The panic of emergency surgery on a premature baby with a rare intestinal disorder resonates from the riveting first chapter of novelist Magary’s (The Postmortal, 2011, etc.) memoir. The scene captures the author’s knack for electric prose as he dictates the wild, wooly world of parenthood. Magary doesn’t mince words about the many blissfully unencumbered years of marriage before he and his wife had children (“You can live cheaply. You can do drugs. You’re mobile, with no goddamn kids anchoring you to one location. You can even get divorced with a minimum of fuss”), freely partaking of spontaneous beach trips and a particular Oasis concert the writer recalls with an acerbic, fork-tongued wit many readers will either love or hate. Potent anecdotes about their first child are laugh-out-loud funny, but when coupled with the descriptive ordeal of a second child by C-section, Magary’s life becomes awash in baby monitors, an unfortunate DUI, head lice and toddler conflict resolution. A healthy sense of humor and a modern outlook on life is necessary to “get” much of what irks the author about being a parent in a memoir that shines with refreshing realness. For all his potty-mouthed, free-form commentary, Magary demonstrates a noble belief in love, honor and freeze-framing moments with kids who always seem to grow up way too fast. Missteps and foibles aside, the author admits to being happy and grateful as a family man, “even if it isn’t as fun a life as when you were single and drinking shots…in the Giants Stadium parking lot.”
An outspoken dad’s brassy, wise and painfully honest view from the top of the family tree.Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59240-832-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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