A soul-searching memoir makes poetic hay of the saw that you can take the boy out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the boy. Mays's picturesque childhood on a Louisiana cotton plantation ended abruptly with his parents' deaths. He withdrew into a fantasy of ultra-Southernness and, after a mental breakdown, rejected Dixie altogether and settled in Canada, where he's the art critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail. The death of Aunt Vandalia, final occupant of his childhood home, instigates a midlife quest to rediscover his southern roots. That quest leads to tidewater Virginia (where his first ancestor, an Anglican priest, arrived in 1609), to colonial South Carolina, and finally to the Deep South of Mississippi and Louisiana. The power referred to in the title (from an old gospel hymn) is paternalistic duty, a patrician sense of decorum and behavior that once made up the ``codes and tactics of Southern existence handed down, father to son'' and that persist, for Mays at least, ``at the deep levels of consciousness where the anthropological oddments of `Southern culture'. . . are irrelevant.'' Those oddments, which compose the popular conception of the South canonized and promoted by the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the burgeoning academic field of Southern studies, represent Southernness in only the narrowest sense, he convincingly argues. Mays, more interested in memory than history, seeks a broader definition. Like a graduate student deconstructing literary texts, he mines deep significance from tombstone epitaphs and family snapshots, communing dutifully with the ``genius loci'' of his ancestors' far-flung homes. The portrait of Southernness that emerges—rooted inexorably in land, classical notions of agrarian harmony, and Golden Age Greek and Roman myth and epic—is decidedly elitist, and narrow in its own right. Mays thoughtfully interprets Southern culture, but his self-absorption makes the journey less compelling as memoir than as history. (8 pages b&w photos) ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018269-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© 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.
