More learned than most travelogues, this fond remembrance of both a little girl who suffered for her faith and the people...
A rarity: a literal hagiography, but much more.
Novelist Green (The Dead of the House, 1972) here relates the story of Saint Foy, a young girl betrayed by her father and put to death by Roman authorities for her Christian faith in about A.D. 290. The site of her martyrdom, a village in southwestern France called Conques, has long been an important center of pilgrimage and healing, served by both the warm springs of the Massif Central and a local belief in miracles wrought by the saint’s benevolent spirit. Green relates Foy’s story, with sometimes overwrought emotion, in a poetic narrative that celebrates the young girl’s constancy, a story that will be of great appeal to readers of all beliefs. Perhaps even more importantly, Green (who died in 1996) spent much of the last quarter-century of her life in and around Conques, and she paints a loving portrait of village life in a little-visited part of France—a poor place abandoned by its young and inhabited largely, it seems, by partisan veterans of WWII with a long memory for the injuries inflicted by the Germans and their homegrown collaborators. Green’s cast of characters includes wizened widows, a sardonic village priest, and cigarette-puffing farmers whose language and customs retain an air of the medieval. “The writer who uses ennui in [the local manner] today is committing an archaïsme,” she writes of one turn of phrase. “Yet this is the way the people here talk, and it is only one example of an older French that survives here along with the ancient langue d'oc.”
More learned than most travelogues, this fond remembrance of both a little girl who suffered for her faith and the people who work a stony land today is immensely appealing.Pub Date: July 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-394-56595-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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