A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.
A successful literary agent recounts her life and especially her relationship with her father, who was “a mass of contradictions: a pacifist and a tyrant, an optimist with demons, a hippie and a conservative, a proud father and jerk, and a boy and a man.”
Hosier (co-author: Hit So Hard, 2017) has long dealt with unresolved “daddy issues,” but she thought she had tucked the baggage neatly away—that is, until her mother sold the family home and, salvaging the last few childhood relics, the author dug out a Beatles-heavy stack of inherited records. After that opening scene, Hosier proceeds to detail her life story, one closely intertwined with her father, who reared the household on the entire Fab Four canon. “The Beatles records…had provided the soundtrack to our lives and seen us through every great joy and tragedy,” she writes. “Dad and I used those songs to both connect with and escape from each other, to both understand and rebel against each other.” Titled with songs from “Blackbird” to “Hey Jude,” each chapter reveals chronological milestones that shaped the author’s coming-of-age in rural 1980s Ohio. Underneath what seemed an idyllic “Here Comes the Sun” childhood stirred a controlling father who became increasingly volatile. Eventually, writes Hosier, life became “the anxiety of constantly walking on eggshells, the need for order and control, [and] the impulse to try to save others while losing [myself].” Permeated with events like church boot camp and school graduations, the narrative is near cinematic with insights about gender roles, love, and sex gained through experiences involving her parents, romantic relationships, God, and rock music. Struggling through a host of various traumas both minor and major, her mother’s inability to break free, and her father’s battle with cancer and eventual death, Hosier delivers a memoir that is less about chasing an identity and more about having one cast upon her and coming to terms with it.
A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4495-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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