A bleak, often heart-wrenching account of two children who made their own way during a difficult time with difficult people.
Vaughan’s debut memoir recalls her and her brother’s childhoods.
In this memoir of growing up during the Depression and World War II in Indiana, Vaughan explores her relationships with family members. Her bedrock was her older brother, Genie. Together they navigated their complex school-year lives in Marion, Ind., with two hardworking, stressed parents who couldn’t make ends meet despite their three jobs. Vaughan and Genie spent summers on a 40-acre farm with their loving maternal grandparents and the “Old Ones,” their grandmother’s problematic, not-so-loving parents. Their summers were not bucolic adventures. The near 100-year-old great-grandfather suffered from dementia, occasionally shooting at his great-grandchildren for sport. Their great-grandmother was a mean-spirited harpy who took delight in hurling verbal abuse at her daughter, Florrie. The farm provided the setting for most of Genie and Vaughan’s adventures with a rotating cast of badly behaved animals—mainly acquired by Grandpa in ill-advised trades—that added challenges and hilarity to the children’s summers. Particularly memorable is Big Red, the raping rooster, who was ultimately executed. Genie’s imagination further sustained them; he treated Vaughan as his corporal as they carried out missions around the house to keep it safe from Nazi invaders. Meanwhile, Genie also kept his sister safe from bullies at home. A realistic snapshot of troubled family life 60 years ago, this is book is appropriate for YA and adult readers. The author and Genie garner sympathy as they deal with far weightier matters—abuse, death, deprivation—than children their ages should encounter. Genie was not just his younger sister’s protector and caretaker but a young man admired by his peers, who was able to transcend poverty and self-consciousness. Vaughan’s novel is a tribute to her beloved brother, as well as her loving grandparents.
A bleak, often heart-wrenching account of two children who made their own way during a difficult time with difficult people.Pub Date: June 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1456375911
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© 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.
