Most of this understated memoir recounts the author’s experiences and affection for his family, with some privileged...
A warm recollection of a lauded poet.
Hughes and his younger siblings, Olwyn and Ted, grew up in a Yorkshire village, moving to the mining town of Mexborough when Ted was 8 and the author 18. As young children, the two boys shared a love of the outdoors, camping in the woods, hunting with air rifles and especially fishing. Ted followed his older brother around devotedly, constantly asking questions. In Mexborough, though, their paths diverged, with the author leaving school to work in the wholesale clothing business, as a trainee fitter at the Bessemer Steel Works and, after an injury, as an auto mechanic. Olwyn and Ted, meanwhile, excelled in grammar school, won scholarships and headed to university. After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, the author decided to begin training with the Nottingham City Police Force. Discouraged by poor food and housing, he decided to leave for Australia, seduced by a travel agent’s advertisement that read, “Come to the sun: migrate to Australia.” He settled there for the rest of his life. From 1948 until Ted’s death in 1998, the brothers saw each other only sporadically. Ted, of course, became famous for his poetry—he was poet laureate of England for 14 years—and his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which ended in her suicide. The author never met Plath, but he includes letters from his family describing their delight with her but also some concerns. Although Sylvia and Ted apparently were happy, they seemed not as “lively and cheery” as the author and his wife. Though he does not provide any analysis of his brother’s work, Hughes reprints some of Ted’s poems that have links to family experiences and notes works in his Collected Poems that are rooted in their childhood.
Most of this understated memoir recounts the author’s experiences and affection for his family, with some privileged glimpses into Ted’s life.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250045270
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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