Raw, compelling, and darkly lyrical.
A British journalist and critic tells the story of a working-class adolescence overshadowed by traumatic experiences with sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher.
The son of northern English Catholic parents, Caveney (Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg, 1999, etc.) was a “devout child” who didn’t know he was working-class until he was in grammar school and “met people who weren’t.” He worked through his feelings of rejection and made friends with fellow outsiders. Together, they bonded over the music of Patti Smith, the Pretenders, and Joy Division while Caveney found personal solace in the novels of Kafka. As he grew up and became more critical of his world, he began to hate the “parochiality [and]…lack of imagination” that characterized the people around him. His life changed drastically after he met “Rev. Kev,” the rebel English teacher at his Catholic high school who “smoked ‘pot’…[and] was into Stevie Wonder.” Drawn to Rev. Kev’s culture and intelligence, Caveney regularly chatted with his teacher about books, ideas, and his hatred of the “small-souled petty-minded white working class.” Their conversations led to a night out to the theater, which ended with the Rev. Kev’s forcing himself on Caveney before taking him home. Unwilling to speak of that episode and of many similar ones that followed, the author kept the molestation a secret from his parents. The author ultimately broke free of his teacher’s influence; but the helplessness and rage simmering just below the surface impacted almost every subsequent personal relationship he had. Even more devastatingly, it pushed the adult Caveney into “psych wards, rehabs, [and] therapists’ offices” to find answers for the anguish that continued to torment him long after he left home. Despite its dark subject matter, the book is neither hopeless nor despairing thanks in large part to the author’s mordant wit. Caveney seeks to understand pain and find redemption through the very act of surviving.
Raw, compelling, and darkly lyrical.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6596-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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