Exquisitely paced, masterful storytelling.
A George Polk Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist skillfully investigates the history of his family, recovering the life of the father he never knew.
Near the end of this affecting memoir, veteran New York Times correspondent Darnton (Black and White and Dead All Over, 2008, etc.) marvels at the “difference that one little sliver of shrapnel meant to our lives.” He’s referring first to the bomb fragment that killed his father, NYT correspondent Barney Darnton, during World War II, and second to his mother “Tootie,” brother Bob and himself, only 11 months old when Barney died. Not until 60 years later, after decades of romanticizing and mythologizing his father, did John set out to discover just who Barney really was. The man he unearths is far different from the idealized figure in his head, the entire excavation complicated by the layers of silence or fabrication Tootie supplied her boys as she buckled under the pressures of single-parenting, moving to a succession of increasingly modest homes and assuming a string of important and then less-worthy jobs, losing them not to the “grogginess” she complained of, but rather to alcoholism. Darnton chronicles how he and his brother grew and coped, but mostly he focuses on his parents, and especially the search for Barney. From notebooks, clip files, letters and government archives, the author assembles a picture of his father, and he learns even more from numerous interviews with his parents’ colleagues, friends and family members. He journeys across America, to an island off Scotland and to the New Guinea beach where Barney’s corpse was canoed ashore—he interviews the soldier horrified by handling that bloody detail and a native, only six at the time, who witnessed the aerial attack—following leads as far as possible, seeking only the truth. The facts he uncovers—about his father’s character, about the incident that killed him, about his parents’ meeting—are often uncomfortable, but, thirsty for honest answers, he faithfully reports what he learns.
Exquisitely paced, masterful storytelling.Pub Date: March 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26617-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
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