Generally uneven—at its best, this recalls Jill Ker Conway’s Road from Coorain; at its worst, a school theme paper.
Memories of family, single parenthood and sheep in the remote wilds of Wales.
In the first 150 pages of her memoir, Clare describes the courtship and marriage of his willful, endearing, frustrating parents. Though Jenny and Robert were journalists in London, she insisted on buying a farm in Wales for weekend getaways and, as the months rolled by, wanted to spend more and more time there. But the arrival of the children made it clear to Robert that they simply could not afford the second property. Eventually, Jenny had to choose, and went for the sheep and the Welsh landscape over her marriage. Clare’s descriptions of that landscape are evocative and simple: “In the cold the mountains look like clenched fists,” he writes. Remarkably evenhanded portraits of his parents present their flaws and foibles with generosity and sensitivity; without editorializing, the author offers lengthy quotations from Jenny and Robert’s letters and journals. He falters, however, when discussing his boyhood. Conversations with Jenny about the possibility that the farm is haunted are a bit too precious, as are transcribed “chats” with cuckoo birds: “ ‘Cuckoo,’ he shouted. ‘CUCKOO!’ I answered. ‘Cuck-coo?’ he replied. . . . ‘Cuckcoo,’ I affirmed.” Fortunately, the memoir comes back around to Jenny, who decided after a failed love affair to sell the farm. Clare renders the leave-taking beautifully. “ ‘Well, goodbye, little farm,’ Jenny said. . . . It sounded strange and unconvincing, as though neither she nor the place really believed she was leaving.”
Generally uneven—at its best, this recalls Jill Ker Conway’s Road from Coorain; at its worst, a school theme paper.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7427-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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