Over ten years in the making, Talese's latest was well worth the wait, and will certainly redeem his embarrassingly participatory foray into the sexual revolution in Thy Neighbor's Wife (1980). Incorporating fictional technique, Talese's massive genealogical tale has all the sweep and detail of a grand 19th- century novel. Talese here asks the simple question: How did his father, Joseph, a tailor trained in his small village in southern Italy, end up plying his trade in an equally remote town on the New Jersey shore? The answer is anything but simple and demands a look into the historical background of the great migrations of our century. Relying on family letters, diaries, and interviews, Talese views Italian history from the bottom up, charting the effect of major events on ordinary people. From occupation by Bourbon Kings and Napoleon to Garibaldi and the unification of the country, from intervention in WW I to the rise of Mussolini and Fascism—the south of Italy has always maintained its unique character, an odd combination of anarchic individualism and communal piety. The Talese family mostly hails from Maida, a small village not far from the tip of the Italian boot. And there, Talese's ancestors dwelt for centuries until the social breakdown of the modern world penetrated the region. While great-grandfather Domenico continued as the familial patriarch, he could no longer demand that his son remain in Italy. Gaetano, after whom the author is named, joined the search for remunerative labor in the New World, and found himself working construction in the bizarrely feudal town of Ambler, Pennsylvania. His wife became one of the ``white widows,'' those women who stayed behind with the children while their men worked overseas. From an early age, father-to-be Joseph filled his own head with dreams of emigration. His story is neatly juxtaposed with that of his cousin, Antonio, who fled the confining world of Maida for success as a tailor in Paris. But Joseph ventured further, eventually setting up shop among the stern Protestants of Ocean City, New Jersey, where his son grew up deracinated but always curious about his otherness. This stunning combination of history and autobiography is the perfect antidote to the operatic romanticism of The Godfather. It's a major contribution to the literature of diaspora. (Book-of-the- Month Main Selection for March)
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41034-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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