Life at the turn of the century in the lumber camps of the Mississippi Delta, as recalled by a woman pioneer who cooked for hundreds; raised a family; and, with humor and courage, overcame a host of daunting obstacles. Written on scraps of paper in the 1930's at the request of journalist Helen Dick Davis, who edited the manuscript, Mary Hamilton's autobiography was rejected by publishers who felt that the memoirs of a pioneering woman were of no interest. Fortunately, times have changed, and we can now appreciate this remarkable tale of a woman with little formal schooling but tremendous spirit and an intuitive wisdom. Raised in the wild country of Arkansas, Hamilton met her husband, the mysterious Englishman Frank Hamilton, at the boardinghouse she helped her widowed mother run. When her dying mother made her promise to marry Frank and to raise her younger brother and sister, Mary agreed—but ``to be honest, I admired him but I did not love him.'' Over the years, admiration turned to love, but Frank—who hinted at a distinguished background—never fully took Mary into his confidence; he also drank when under pressure, and, in the resulting binges, squandered the money Mary had saved. Her life was filled with work—she did everything from baking 115 loaves of bread a day to milking cows; with hardships—floods that destroyed her home in the camps, as well as a series of financial set-backs that ended her dream of having her own house; and with death—four of her nine children died in early childhood. Courageous, never self-pitying, Mary was quick to note the help of loyal friends; the loving support of her children; and the natural beauty of the Delta in which she lived. A salutary reminder of just what those too-often unremembered women did in opening up this country. A splendid and long overdue addition to the pioneering canon.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-87805-579-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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