Tales from a one-time Southern Baptist.
Cain’s memoir begins with promise in a gripping prologue. The reader meets the author in the midst of his young son’s desperate hospital experience, as the boy clings to life and the parents cling to sanity. The author hoped to receive some assistance from his parents, aging Tennessee Baptists a world apart from their New York City son, but his request was met only with excuses and an eventual brief and uncomfortable visit. Readers begin to understand that whatever has passed in the intervening years, Cain and his parents are no longer family except in name. Apparently drawn to his memories through the trauma of his son’s illness, the author recounts various episodes from his boyhood and adolescence in Chattanooga. The book proves to be a page-turner, but Cain disappoints in two key ways. First, his vignettes are meant to pique the reader’s interest in Southern Baptist culture, but little of what is shared is particularly unique. Second, where the author does introduce meaty subject matter, he fails to deliver with introspection or analysis. For instance, in one scene Cain recounts being trapped in a car during a race riot, but aside from sharing the memory and the realization that race problems would not go away, he leaves the reader wanting more. As Cain prepared to enter college, he was obviously happy to be leaving, even fleeing, the culture of his youth. However, his transition from overly pious Evangelical teen to James Joyce–quoting, humanist college freshman is abrupt and unexamined. Though laced with interesting characters and descriptive writing, Cain’s memoir could have delivered so much more. Pleasantries and pathos, but not a lot of point.
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46394-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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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