Fans will find this go-round less zippy (forgive the pun), but more honest.
In Kimmel’s follow-up to her well-received memoir about growing up in a tiny Indiana town (A Girl Named Zippy, 2001), the “She” of the title is Kimmel’s mother, whose mid-life decision to attend college in the early 1970s disrupted her family’s equilibrium.
Kimmel picks up where she left off: The Jarvis family is still in Mooreland, a town of 300 where everyone knows not only your name but most of your business. Zippy’s best friends are still Rose and Julie. Her much older sister Melinda is still bedeviling her. Her seriously overweight, clearly depressed mother is still sitting on the couch reading book after book while Zippy’s slightly mysterious father still comes and goes as he pleases. And Zippy is still a carefree tomboy frequently getting into humorous scrapes and secure in the bosom of friends and family. But change is in the air. Melinda gets married and is soon raising her own babies, the two new loves in Zippy’s life. Zippy’s father, after retiring early from his factory job on disability, volunteers as a sheriff’s deputy. School consolidation introduces new friends into Zippy’s life. Most important, Zippy’s mother Delonda, who left behind her ambitions and middle-class background when she married Bob Jarvis at 17, decides to attend Ball State University. Despite having no money, no driver’s license and a disapproving husband, she makes the daily commute—she pays expenses on her VW beetle by becoming a driving advertisement for Herbal Essences shampoo—and excels in her classes, going on to earn her masters and teach English at the local high school. As Delonda’s horizons broaden, her marriage falls apart. Kimmel carefully limits the darkness to the edges until the last chapters, but sadness at losing her father to divorce permeates her stories, leavening their tendency toward cuteness.
Fans will find this go-round less zippy (forgive the pun), but more honest.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8499-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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