A gripping self-analysis of a boy’s attempt to deal with inescapable abuse.
A journalist’s searing, painfully intimate memoir of a dysfunctional Franco-American family inescapably bound to the father’s World War II experiences.
The author, one-time editor-in-chief of France’s Le Figaro, recounts in stark detail an adolescence shaped by the abuse of his American father. A GI who landed on the Normandy beachhead, he regularly beat his French wife, Giesbert’s mother, for years. Yet the motivation for this unsparing memoir is the guilt that remains in the author’s own mind as the result of his ultimately turning away from his father. In this reconstruction of his youth, the author portrays a heritage of affluent privilege on the American side, cultural affinities on the French; yet his father, Giesbert asserts, was a Francophile and openly dismissive of America’s consumerist culture. An artist at heart, he eventually saw himself mired in a bourgeois marriage where children kept coming almost as an act of revenge. After several years in the States, where the author was born, the family moved to Normandy, where the agrarian countryside and doting French grandparents provided respite for the young Giesbert, whose mother was “beaten to a pulp” several times a week. Eventually, the author comes to fix on the Normandy landing as the point where his father somehow snapped. Seeing so many comrades slaughtered and helpless to do anything about it, the author’s father recollected in unguarded moments not the heroism or triumph over the Nazis but the fact that so many, including himself, lost control of their bowel and bladder functions during the horrors of the landing. “In the last years of his life,” Giesbert sums up, “each time he hung around me waiting to start a conversation, I changed rooms. I had an excuse … [he] robbed me of my childhood.”
A gripping self-analysis of a boy’s attempt to deal with inescapable abuse.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42367-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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