A loving and often hilarious recollection of the author’s family and other denizens of East Texas’s Big Thicket region. Certain writers—Joseph Mitchell, Armistead Maupin, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few—have absorbed the essence of the region they write about so thoroughly that the settings themselves, as described by those authors, are just as crucial to a reader’s enjoyment as the plots and characters they surround. Swift (Mother of Pearl, 1990, etc.) has the good fortune to have grown up in a region whose very name—the Big Thicket—promises a rollicking tale or two, and he doesn—t disappoint. Now a national biological preserve, this area of East Texas was still wild enough during the author’s youth in the 1940s and ’50s that the eccentricity of its inhabitants was derived as much from their environment as their personalities. The author freely admits that “not only did [his family and friends from that time] live their lives as if they were characters springing from the pages of a book, they were front porch storytellers of the highest order.” Swift has inherited this storytelling gene, and the material that his family has provided is so bizarre that it frequently straddles the line between memoir and tall tale—the title episode, which involves an unusual pickling, being a case in point. Happily, the author manages to avoid the sentimentality of some other recent memoirs; though he shows great affection for his childhood friends and family, he harbors no illusions about them. Especially resonant are Swift’s portraits of the women of his family, particularly his mother, who was widowed in WWII and became the anchor of his extended family. He provides a funny, mournful depiction of her as a woman who “was about transcending sadness with laughter.” The mythic South at its most entertaining. (39 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8203-2100-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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