A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.
Hickam’s 1950s West Virginian coal-town story (Rocket Boys, 1998) continues: a polished memoir of a roughhewn place seen through his eyes as a perceptive, questing teenager.
Not exactly Versailles to begin with, Coalwood slid into outright misery when Hickam was a boy. Once a benign company town—prosperous, safe, paternal—it was sold to a steel conglomerate not long after the miners formed a union. A kind of winter of the soul then descended upon Coalwood, which was now just another item on the ledger that had to show a profit. Suddenly, the miners had to buy their houses (or get out), forget about medical treatments, increase their production (with no expansion of manpower), and underwrite all town activities themselves. Of course, as the author explains, these had been the very ties that bound Coalwood together. For the first time, hunger came to town, and Hickam’s father, the mine superintendent, felt each new insult from the steel company as a blow to the solar plexus. Unlike the author’s earlier memoir, which centered on the rocket club he belonged to and mined the rocket metaphor as relentlessly as the town dug coal, this one is more diffuse. A number of strains play themselves out against the background malaise: the mother’s desire to flee Coalwood, the little cruelties of small-town life balanced by little acts of kindness, the gamble taken in reopening a jinxed shaft, and the author’s hurtful relationship with his father (a distant, careworn, black-lunged character). Hickam overdoes the youthful rustic pose, and home truths clog the airwaves (“I’m sorry you got troubles, Sonny, but that’s called life”). But in its quiet, sentimental, coming-of-age way, Hickam’s story is involving, and he paints a nice landscape: “Coalwood’s houses were jammed between steep, humpbacked mountains packed so close together a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one hill to the other.” And the ending—a happy one, all around—couldn’t be too sweet for Coalwood’s deserving townsfolk.
A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33516-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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