A literary memoir that's part paean to the golden-age South and part unstinting critique of that region's corrupting segregation and cultural rigidity. Award-winning novelist Spencer (The Night Travellers, 1991, etc.) has led a peripatetic life, traveling widely in Europe and living for many years in Canada. But her hometown of Carrollton, Miss., remains a locus for both memory and fiction. She writes glowingly of a happy childhood in the 1920s and '30s, surrounded by a doting extended family and immersed in the genteel rhythms of plantation life. Early on, she realized the importance (and the constriction) of maintaining appearances in a society where orderliness and prescribed behavior were paramount. Her problems with authority and her budding noncomformity—expressed first in a love of books and writing and later in her support of desegregation—eventually led to estrangement from her father, a businessman who valued commerce above art and racial equality. Spencer's preference for remembering her hometown's nurturing goodness, rather than the flaws that drove her out, is illustrated by her refusal to revisit the decrepit remains of once-grand mansions inhabited by family and friends: ``Where Carrollton is concerned it seems a desecration to recognize that time exists at all.'' She does confront Mississippi's intransigence on race, recounting her horror over the Emmett Till murder and the inseparable divide it opened within her family. Tales of travel in Germany, Italy, France, and England (and her life as a published but impoverished writer in New York) paint a romantic picture of bohemian life. Literary friendships and encounters with Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and a memorably frosty William Faulkner are detailed in entertaining and vivid thumbnail characterizations. More than simply personal history, Spencer's self-portrait of her literary development dramatically personifies the high price the South paid for driving out its best and brightest. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45739-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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