A graceful meditation on the often unsuspected family legacies ``that somehow make up the landscape that identifies who one might be.'' Hampsten (English/University of North Dakota) was especially pleased when, after the death of her mother (Elizabeth Lockwood) in 1979, her father handed her a hatbox of letters Lockwood had written to her own parents. The letters—begun in 1928, while Lockwood was a student at Wellesley—provided a record of the woman's life after college: her early married years as the wife of a foreign-service officer; the births of her four children; and life on ``Double A,'' a ranch Hampsten's parents had bought in Arizona. Hampsten read the letters not only ``to enjoy again Mother's wit, her kindness, her pride in [her] children and the interesting life she had led, but to try to fathom better what the letters meant to her, and what part writing them had in a life of hers separate from children.'' In time, Hampsten's quest to know her mother better became a search to learn more about herself and her grandparents—a search that she examines here through a series of essays. The first lovingly describes her childhood on the ranch- -a hard, lonely life for her mother, used to the more stimulating existence of a diplomat's wife, but an idyllic one for a young girl. The final essay is a frank examination of Hampsten's often awkward relationship with her own daughter. In between, she describes, with the past always a touchstone, her grandparents, childhood, education, travels, marriage, and children—all along recognizing those strands of looks, gestures, and habits that link the generations. A vivid evocation of place as well as period distinguishes this low-key but bittersweet and affecting memoir of the ``signatures that bind us together in a family.''
Pub Date: April 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-8165-1370-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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