As the family photos illustrating this memoir attest, for Smith, all was sunshine, smiles, and elegance.
Fond memories from the last surviving child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy.
Smith, the eighth of her parents’ nine children, offers a warm portrait of her happy childhood, when she reveled in the company of her brothers and sisters, guided by her inspiring, supportive parents. Born in 1928, she grew up in their Bronxville home, where the family moved from Brookline, Massachusetts, to be closer to Joseph Kennedy’s work in Manhattan, and in their beloved summer house in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. “Saltwater was in our blood,” she writes, “in our genes.” Smith portrays Joe as a devoted father and husband who “flooded us with affection” and enjoyed nothing more than dinner—promptly served at 7:15—surrounded by his adoring clan. Dinner conversation veered toward politics, with “a lighthearted game” that consisted of quizzes about what each child would do if confronted with one political problem or another. Both parents instilled in the children a sense of service and responsibility; Rose was a stickler for lessons, which she felt “strengthened our knowledge and resolve.” These included music, sports, art, languages, and whatever “subject and hobby that interested us, and even some that did not.” Managing nine children involved discipline and organization. Anyone who disobeyed was sent to Rose’ clothes closet for punishment. She guided the children’s mealtime and bedtime prayers, and she kept track of their “vital statistics” on index cards, which she updated each week. Smith idolized her older brothers Joe (who was her godfather) and Jack (godfather to Teddy); her closest playmate was Teddy, the last born; and she adored her elegant sisters Kick and Pat. Smith defends her parents’ decision to treat Rosemary’s “anxieties” and “agitation” with a lobotomy, which went “tragically wrong.” As with other losses and crises, the family “could do only one thing in the aftermath: move forward.” The author’s idealized view of her family counters many biographical portraits of the Kennedys.
As the family photos illustrating this memoir attest, for Smith, all was sunshine, smiles, and elegance.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244422-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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