Vibrantly, blissfully sublime.
A creatively executed memoir rekindling the epoch of an eccentric native New Yorker.
The “lasting city” in openly gay novelist McCourt’s (Now Voyagers, 2007, etc.) creative chronicle is, of course, Manhattan. The author supplies autobiographical details through vacillating memories, both fond and painful, and weaves them together in an artful tapestry of fever-dreamed conversations, nostalgic poignancy and rich Gotham history. His mother’s death in 2003 seems to be the catalyst here. Awash in grief, McCourt, now in his early 70s, writes of leaving her deathbed to desperately scurry into the city to share his heartache with strangers like an aging Broadway showgirl/diner waitress and an Indian cabbie, who both seemed to restore his faith in humanity. Further recollections detail McCourt’s troublesome Irish-Catholic family and upbringing, which commingle beautifully with memories of his precocious adolescence as a burgeoning homosexual in the 1950s. Undeterred by the era’s often violent consequences for indulging in same-sex carnalities, the author reveled in clandestine trysts on Fire Island or wandered Central Park’s Ramble, “by night the haunt of the sexually intrepid male homosexual horndog on the scent.” McCourt’s drifting, serpentine narrative unfurls a lush and prideful profile, painstakingly contemplated and clearly written from the heart. The writer tells the stories of his gay youth, his family’s melodrama and his own sweet maturation with an intoxicating amalgam of poetry, quotation, fantasy, and the kind of sweeping, colorful language that creates a kaleidoscope of precious memories. In the opening chapter, his outspoken mother, mere weeks before succumbing to the stroke that would cause her death, urges her son to “tell everything.” From that instruction springs forth McCourt’s shimmering opus of a unique, regretless and effervescent lifetime in the existential city of dreams.
Vibrantly, blissfully sublime.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-458-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
