Autobiographical tales, told with elegant simplicity, of a boyhood spent among the rocky bluffs and woods of Cherokee country. Ross (Creative Writing/Central State Univ., Edmond, Oklahoma) was born in 1929 on an Oklahoma homestead above the slopes of a mountain named not after raccoons but after the original Cherokee owners. The author's mother, proud of her respectable Arkansas upbringing (she was one of a dozen children), maintained that Oklahoma was still Indian territory and ``only pretended to be a state to please the Federal government.'' His father, who quit school at 14 and worked five years in the Colombian oil fields for the money to buy the homestead from his grandfather, was a master farmer and coon hunter. (He once sold his favorite blue-tick hound for a year's income, but had to buy the dog back to keep peace in the family.) Ross himself is a master of the old American art of storytelling. His grandfather—Monroe Garrison—left home as a teenager, Ross tells us, to take up with a circuit-riding preacher. Garrison lived with the preacher and his nine children, married and started his own family in the same house, and cared for the aging preacher. A railroad line was put in 20 miles away, and by turning pigs into the woods, letting them multiply, and herding them out, Garrison and the preacher's sons made thousands, permitting Garrison to get his own home. Ross takes us coon- hunting on the mountain at night; foraging for forgotten treats- -possum grapes, black haws, hackberries, persimmons; and, along with his father and his farmer friends, working hard on the most infernal, labor-intensive machine ever made: the horse-drawn, hand-fed hay-baler. A marvelous evocation, related with Twain-like skill, of a recent past so utterly vanished as to seem ancient.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8061-2405-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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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