A wryly eloquent memoir of world travel and the joys, and difficulties, of returning home.
An award-winning writer’s account of a life lived in flight from a Louisiana birthplace that ultimately drew him back.
A fifth-generation New Orleans native, Nolan’s (Higher Ground, 2011, etc.) Southern roots ran deep. But by 1968, he realized that his birthplace was as much a “jailhouse” as the psychiatric ward where his mother’s doctor had temporarily confined him for the rebellious behavior he saw as “sick.” After his girlfriend and an ACLU lawyer helped him get out, he took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. There, he befriended members of the theater group the Cockettes and lost his “gay cherry” in the process. After trips to Colombia, Nolan then became involved in political protests against the American government’s nefarious involvement in Latin America, especially the democratically elected government of Chile. By the mid-1970s, he had become an itinerant professor, fallen in love with a dancer, and moved to Guatemala. His association with political dissenters led to arrest and incarceration, but his escape-artist talent saved him from “certain death” yet again, and he was able to go free. However, like the forebears who had “move[d] across oceans” in the 19th century to establish a life in the French Quarter, Nolan soon found himself doing much the same. His first crossing was to Spain then, a few years later, to China, a country from which he fled after a semester of teaching at a university where he was excluded from planning a revolution for which he hungered. Eventually he returned to New Orleans only to watch his birthplace, already caught in a “boozy maelstrom of guns and drugs, murder and corruption,” struggle in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Filled with eccentric characters—many of whom Nolan memorializes with included black-and-white photographs—and outrageous situations, Nolan’s work also offers serious, often sardonic reflections on such diverse topics as race, family, consumerism, progress, and the fate of a generation of countercultural idealists.
A wryly eloquent memoir of world travel and the joys, and difficulties, of returning home.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4968-1127-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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