An engaging if ultimately somber 200-year history of a family and the rise and decline of the small Pennsylvania town that was their home. Journalist Simpson (The American Family: A History in Photographs, 1977, etc.) culled generations of daybooks, family stories, and histories to record the public lives and private longings of his relatives in a once proud railroad town called Parnassus, located east of Pittsburgh. It officially ceased to exist in 1931. Simpson uses a variety of homely talismans to reconstruct generations of family history and psychology: An 18th-century Indian captivity narrative mirrors his mother's lifelong feeling of oppression; an ankle bracelet tells the complex story of a thwarted love. By showing the unwavering adherence of his grandparents to the failing town, and to the 19th-century standards of family life and citizenship it represented, he is able to demonstrate how his relatives and their hometown became so deeply interconnected. Pittsburgh figures in the narrative as well. There are archetypal American elements in the history of that brawling city: immigrants, industry, union strife, and larger-than-life characters (Carnegie, Mellon, Frick). Simpson touches on these vivid elements but concentrates on the impact of the nearby city on his family, and he finds in the modest details of their lives a clear reflection of the larger American experience. By focusing on the end of the family and not harking (as do memoirists like Donald Hall and Annie Dillard) to the immutable cycles of nature, he loses a chance for solace, but in doing so maintains the integrity of his work. When the family dwindles to its last mortal member, there is no comfort—only Simpson's knowing reflection that ``they had gone as far as they could go,'' because with him, a homosexual, ``the end of the line had come.'' Uncomfortable in its finality, direct but not always graceful in style, this book is best read as the fulfillment of a final descendant's lifetime obsession.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94122-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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