A stirring life story recounted in straightforward, serviceable prose.
Biography of the disabled Irish artist and author whose life story inspired the Oscar-winning film My Left Foot.
The film was 13 years old and its subject long dead in 2003, when a chatty Dublin taxi driver first tipped off University College undergrad Hambleton about Christy Brown (1932–81). She began reading his poetry, memoirs and sole novel. Amazed that there had been no scholarly investigation of this extraordinarily accomplished work, she chose Brown as the subject of her masters thesis and then decided to write his biography. Here she dives into his family history, dreams, successes and tribulations. She dexterously recounts the genesis of his illness—double athetoid cerebral palsy caused by partial suffocation at birth, which left his entire body paralyzed save for his left foot. Mute until the age of 17, Brown had no formal schooling and instead garnered bits of knowledge from his many siblings. Determined to see him succeed, his mother tirelessly taught her son two invaluable lessons: how to grasp chalk and brushes with his foot to write letters and paint, and how to use body language and grunts to communicate. As Brown matured, the desire for “an ordinary life” and to be loved by a woman became paramount, as did affinities for classical music (a reliable remedy for his depressions) and travel. His autobiography, My Left Foot, was published in 1954 to great acclaim that somewhat tempered the tragedy of his father’s death the following year. Heavy drinking, hubris, recurring ailments and his mother’s death in 1968 all played a role in his complex, erratic artistic growth. Brown’s 1970 novel, Down All the Days, was an international bestseller, and he went on to marry a nurse. Making use of heretofore unpublished letters and poems, as well as personal interviews with friends and family, the author sheds new insights into what drove Brown’s creativity. Private photos of family and friends and color reproductions of Brown’s paintings add an intimate note to the narrative.
A stirring life story recounted in straightforward, serviceable prose.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84596-280-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mainstream/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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