Expressive and thoroughly entertaining.
Humorously irreverent look at life as the eldest daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher whose philosophy, he once told her, “rests largely on the principle that all God’s glorious, perfect children are also dumb as dirt.”
That pious but realistic comment framed Hancock’s childhood attempts to understand the church people around her as well as her own special role as the PK (preacher’s kid) in 1980s Kentucky. Her experiences will ring true for anyone long involved in a church, as she sardonically tells of busybodies and holier-than-thou congregants while keeping the main focus on the sincere believers who were her true beacon, none more so than her parents and sister. A large portion of the memoir pokes fun at the silly and often maddening people found in any congregation, prompting many a good laugh. “Mrs. Pence” came to Hancock’s father to tattle on a nursery worker for having used “the F-word”; asked to spell the dreaded curse, her answer was “f-a-r-t.” All small-town churches have such humorous legends, which the author shares with great effect. But she goes deeper, delving into her own spiritual journey. As a child, she admits self-effacingly, she viewed herself as a prodigy and, with luck, “the world’s first Baptist saint.” Over time, her simple faith was challenged and deepened. During a bout with severe illness, while she endured a painful procedure, her father held her and hummed, not a hymn, but a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song. Her grandmother’s lengthy decline and death revealed both the hypocrisy of their neighbors and the pain her family could endure. Such experiences are the true crucible of anyone’s faith, and they certainly shaped Hancock. The reader comes away hoping that this rueful autobiographer will tap more of her memories in the future.
Expressive and thoroughly entertaining.Pub Date: June 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59995-708-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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