Badly clouded by self-importance, Miller’s memoir nonetheless displays some fine, clear moments of eloquence and pathos.
A memoir that is both a moving family autobiography and a fairly tedious professional resume.
Poet Miller (Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators?, etc.) directs the African-American Resource Center at Howard University. It could be said that too many personal details of his writing career are given here, and that Miller drops the names of rather a lot of his editors, publishers, grant solicitors, fellow writers, and academicians into the text. (While it may be interesting to learn that Washington’s Mayor Marion Barry was good for the arts, for example, it is somewhat less than riveting to read June Jordan's gushing e-mail to Miller.) Far more engaging, however, is Miller’s account of the psychological forces that molded him into the sensitive, talented father of words that he became. His family life was the key element: Miller’s Panamanian father was an extremely taciturn man who rarely answered a telephone and hardly ever spoke to his own son. An immigrant to the US, Miller’s father settled in New York (Brooklyn, then the Bronx) and gave every appearance of being a devoted, if somewhat reserved, family man. In their most important conversation, however, Miller’s father told his ten-year-old son that he very nearly abandoned the family. In a similarly defining moment for this strained, powerful relationship, the young Miller gave up waiting for his father to pick him up at school one day, closed his eyes, and began to cross a busy street—only to have his father rush to save him at the last minute. Miller’s brother was less fortunate: although he tried his vocation as a monk at one point, he later became a drug addict and died young. Miller’s sister is an important force in his past, and she narrates a dozen fictional sections here.
Badly clouded by self-importance, Miller’s memoir nonetheless displays some fine, clear moments of eloquence and pathos.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24136-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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