A well-written autobiography, artfully folding in another’s story, and alternate course, along with the author’s own.
One man’s slow drift away from the faith of his father.
Looking back on his younger years, biographer Lax (Conversations with Woody Allen, 2007, etc.) provides an intriguing coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Vietnam era. The son of an Episcopal priest, religion played an important role in much of the author’s life, but it is not always at the center of this autobiography. Lax begins with his childhood as the son of two models of Christian piety. Through his parents the author learned about integrity and loving his neighbor, and it was because of their good example that he accepted the Christian faith without question. He entered Hobart College in 1962 and things began to change: “The Book of Common Prayer, where I had been content to find my answers, was suddenly a slim volume indeed.” After Hobart, Lax was faced with the formidable quandary of his day, Vietnam and the draft. He struggled with the decision of whether or not to declare himself a conscientious objector, and whether his growing pacifist beliefs were indeed genuine or self-serving. To avoid both the draft and the conscientious-objector question for a time, he enrolled in the Peace Corps. Assigned to the Truk Islands in Micronesia, Lax spent two years on a tiny island of 185 inhabitants. This tale alone provides a fascinating core for the book, but Lax also juxtaposes his experiences with those of a close friend who enrolled as an Army officer in Vietnam. His friend returned from an intense and horrifying war experience and entered seminary, while Lax came back from the Peace Corps and eventually applied for conscientious-objector status. As his friend became a priest and then a bishop, Lax’s faith slowly receded, and the book comes to a melancholy end with the death of his parents.
A well-written autobiography, artfully folding in another’s story, and alternate course, along with the author’s own.Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27091-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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