A sweetly honest memoir of a girl growing up amid the glare of the rocket launches from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Kercheval's father, a West Point graduate who left the army rather than serve in Vietnam, moved his family from Washington, D.C., to Cocoa, Fla., when the author was 10 years old. This was the setting of her adventurous mother's ultimate collapse from too much Valium and bourbon and of novelist Kercheval's (The Museum of Happiness, 1993) fascination with the nearby space center's early sorties to the moon. Her memories themselves were launched by a shoeboxful of family snapshots sent by her sister Carol, two years her senior and the one who, throughout their childhood, kept the sentimental flame of family burning. It's Carol who demands, typically, ``that we . . . put up a Christmas tree, [and] eat in the dining room at Thanksgiving,'' and who urgently reminds her sister on other occasions that ``we don't do things like that.'' ``Things like that'' range from not wearing shoes when they go out to play to drugs and alcohol (at 16). Jesse meanwhile falls out of a treehouse, has to do time in a body-brace and a wheelchair, and confronts racism and menstruation. Also on her agenda of challenges are sex, drugs, death, the meaning of life, and most of all, the race to the moon. Eventually, ``one by one,'' the whole family gets dispersed—Carol to teach, the flower-child author to wed, and her father to seek a divorce, leaving her drugged-out mother behind. Rising to the occasion, though, the mother drops her Valium and booze to remarry the author's father—just as Kercheval herself is getting a divorce and starting a new life. A familiar coming-of-age story, but punctuated by the romance and thunder of rockets entering space. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-146-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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 2025 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.
