Piecing together fragments of the past in this often moving memoir helps the author understand how she “found relief from...
Filmmaker and former PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth makes her literary debut in an impressionistic memoir that moves back and forth through time from her childhood in Topeka, Kansas, to her work in “conflicted places” such as Cambodia, Chile, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.
The narrative also moves in and out of reality and imagination: as the author reveals in the last pages of the book, one of the surreal childhood events she narrates never happened. Her mother’s death, though, did occur, when she was 9, and the loss was shattering. Although Farnsworth knew her mother was suffering, her father told her that her mother was “gone,” leading her to hope that she would return. Shortly after her death, Farnsworth and her father traveled by train to California to visit relatives, and the child searched for her mother every time the train stopped. In her dramatic rendering of the trip, their train becomes stranded in an avalanche in the Sierra Mountains, and she finds a white stallion, cared for by a cowboy, being transported to Los Angeles to perform in a TV series. These invented scenes—the author riding the powerful horse through the train’s cars and the train’s peril, which had occurred the year before—emphasize her emotional vulnerability at the time. Although the episode felt to her “as if it actually happened,” it confuses the narrative. Real peril occurred repeatedly in her work: she reports interviewing mothers of “disappeared” children in Chile; discovering that Nixon and Kissinger acted to undermine Allende and bolster Pinochet; interviewing leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood after 9/11; fearing for the safety of her crew while reporting from Israel and the West Bank; and reflecting on the morality of news reporting. “I don’t believe I have the right to decide what story is worth another person’s life,” she concludes.
Piecing together fragments of the past in this often moving memoir helps the author understand how she “found relief from self and sorrow by concentrating on the lives of others.”Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-843-2
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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