Herriot's many fans. (8 pages b&w photos)
A heartfelt account of the life of Alf Wight, veterinarian author of the bestselling James Herriot books, by his son.
The younger Wight, who worked alongside his father in theYorkshire practice familiar to millions through books, movies, and television, has created a loving, unsentimental portrait of his well-known father. He draws on the elder Wight’s letters to his parents and his wife, his unpublished writings and unwritten oral narratives, the recollections of friends and colleagues, and his own memories. Instead of turning Alf Wight's life story into a warm Herriot tale, his son acknowledges the health problems that plagued him at veterinary school and later cut short his time in the RAF, the deep depression he experienced in 1960, and the prostate cancer that took his life in 1995. But it is his working life, both as a veterinarian and as a writer, that the author focuses on, and the details here are rich. Particularly gratifying for Herriot's fans are the full-length sketches of the real-life counterparts of such fictional characters as Siegfried and Tristan Farnon—Donald and Brian Sinclair—and their long relationship with the famous author. Wight complicates such relationships still further by introducing the actors and actresses who portrayed Herriot, his wife, and his colorful colleagues in the movie and television versions. (At one point Donald Sinclair, unhappy over his portrayal as Siegfried in the film, threatened a lawsuit, but friendship prevailed.) Yorkshire farmers are here too, although Wight makes clear that the way of life Herriot depicted so well has now vanished. Wight also reveals, using excerpts from an early unpublished novel and from later published stories, how long and hard his father worked at becoming a writer. A thoroughly satisfying biography—believable, entertaining, and filled with engaging characters. Sure to be relished by
Herriot's many fans. (8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-42151-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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