A low-key, well-balanced tribute.
Former president Carter (Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope, 2007, etc.) affectionately remembers his mother, the redoubtable Miss Lillian.
When he was governor of Georgia, Carter visited her at the family home in Plains. “Mama,” he confided, “I’ve decided to run for president.” “President of what?” she wanted to know. On reflection, she admitted, “Well I was pleased. I figured that if he was elected president, someone would open a good restaurant in Plains.” Blunt without malice and disarmingly unfettered, Lillian Carter was a powerful force, remembered here by her son with not only fondness, but great respect for her role as an agent for good. She shared whatever fortune she had without making a big deal of it; knew a bum when she saw one (Joseph McCarthy, for instance, and not the tramps who knocked on her farmhouse door during the Depression); and “just ignored the pervasive restraints of racial segregation.” When her husband died in 1953, the author noted that she “seemed to be searching for whatever was provocative, adventurous, challenging, and gratifying.” Thus she spent eight years as a housemother to a rowdy Auburn University frat, lent her nursing talents to the Peace Corps for two years in a small village in India and became her son’s goodwill ambassador. While she tirelessly campaigned for her son and served as the face of his administration on countless occasions, mostly state funerals, she also took care of herself, tuning out the world when her chosen soap opera aired and enjoying a strong toddy in the late afternoon. The author isn’t shy to note that Miss Lillian could be high maintenance—“She was quite harsh in her criticism when any of us failed to make a regular pilgrimage to pay our respects”—but Carter makes it clear that she passed on her unvarnished decency and sense of fair play to her son.
A low-key, well-balanced tribute.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6245-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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