A harsh story so filled with anger and bad feeling that reading is tough going.
Lugubrious memoir from the nonagenarian author of The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007).
Bernstein was 12 in 1922 when steamship tickets to America from an unknown donor mysteriously arrived, sending the family—hardworking, long-suffering mother, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed father and six children—to join relatives in Chicago. The father, depicted as thoroughly despicable, swiftly alienated the grandmother, and they were all thrown out of the grandparents’ home. But the ’20s were relatively good times, and the young author got a high-school education. Surprisingly, his grandfather, a family embarrassment because he made his living as a street beggar and was the focus of loud, invective-filled family arguments, revealed that a guilty conscience over past injustices to Bernstein’s mother had prompted him to provide the tickets to America. With the Great Depression, family fortunes nosedived, and Bernstein’s plans for higher education ended when his father stole his and his mother’s savings. The author beat up his father and persuaded his mother to flee with him to New York, where his two older brothers helped them settle in Brooklyn. In time, his odious father rejoined them, and the author ran into his eccentric grandfather, who was plying his trade on the streets of New York. Odd family members move in and out of the narrative, and Bernstein inserts episodes from their struggles into his own. Life took a turn for the better when he married his beloved Ruby and took a job as a script reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But for his much put-upon mother, full of disappointed expectations and longings, the dream of a good life in America never materialized. When she discovered that she had been supported for years by the takings of a beggar whose earlier gift she had never been able to repay, she died of a stroke. After her funeral, Bernstein never saw his father again.
A harsh story so filled with anger and bad feeling that reading is tough going.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-50374-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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