lost too soon—as well as a powerful, unsettling lament for the ways in which life's hard realities can diminish one's dreams.
A beautifully written, painfully frank memoir about a death in the family, and a meditation on the fragile bonds of kinship
in the modern world. Dolan was the last of five children born to increasingly distracted parents. He was, by necessity, closer to his three sisters and to his brother, John, who was 11 years his elder. “John,” he remembers, “taught me how to throw a ball, bait a hook, sight a rifle . . . how to ride a motorcycle and drive a stick shift.” Dolan's recollections of the fierce affection and admiration he felt for his brother, who seemed to have an almost effortless command of life's most interesting activities, alternate with passages sketching in a larger portrait of his strained family life with an anxious mother and a taciturn, distant father. These recollections range from Dolan's childhood to the moment when, at the age of 28, he is summoned home from Paris after John is horribly burned in a work-related explosion. Dolan has to struggle to equate the semiconscious, unrecognizable figure in the burn unit with memories of his handsome, diffident brother. Dolan's attempts to puzzle out the course of his brother's life inevitably leads him back to an attempt to piece together the random memories of family events and conflicts into a larger scheme. The shifting balances, the resentments and longings that work themselves out in any family, are brought into focus by John's lingering death, as Dolan, his sisters, and his mother, struggling under the weight of grief that “covered us like a blanket,” must each come to grips with the loss and with what it tells them about their own lives. Dolan unflinchingly peels away the layers from a family's secrets and fears, and in doing so creates a memorial to a brother
lost too soon—as well as a powerful, unsettling lament for the ways in which life's hard realities can diminish one's dreams.Pub Date: March 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40342-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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