A thoughtful, eclectic account of what infrastructure progress can leave in its wake.
A young writer retraces her search for former homes lost to a unique form of urban sprawl.
In her debut memoir, Palmer, an Atlanta-based urban designer with an MFA in creative writing, returns to her Georgia roots to explore what remains of the houses of her youth. Daphne du Maurier’s famous line from Rebecca, “we can never go back again, that much is certain,” takes on literal weight here as the author discovers that all three of her family homes were swallowed up by the encroachment of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. It is considered the world’s busiest airport; the author reports that in 2014, Hartsfield-Jackson “averaged a quarter million passengers each day, roughly 2,500 daily arrivals and departures…something like three flights per minute.” In 1961, Atlanta opened the biggest passenger terminal in the country, and, at that time, the airport boasted the familiar “giant ‘X’ ” configuration of two runways that “could not be duplicated or extended.” When the airport soon became overcrowded, a new master plan scrapped the conventional “criss-cross runways” and “starfish-shaped” terminal for a “series of parallel east/west runways” and linear terminals that increased the land area “fivefold,” leading to its present-day 4,700-acre footprint. Arguing that “everyone uses the airport,” but “no one sees it,” on her return to Atlanta, Palmer originally thought the disappearance of one of the communities she grew up in had something to do with gentrification, where socio-economics or “racial anxiety” played into the desire of certain citizens to be “ ‘comfortably south’ of people that didn’t look like them.” But the more she researched the town’s decline and fall, the more she realized the airport’s flight path had “carved an invisible freeway over Forest Park.” Throughout, Palmer’s clear, engaging prose effectively combines her private-eye–like adventures with emotional discoveries made as she comes to terms with moments and structures erased from her past.
A thoughtful, eclectic account of what infrastructure progress can leave in its wake.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938235-28-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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