A bit about old television and a bit more about being Irish, all proficiently presented.
Toronto Globe and Mail television columnist Doyle debuts with a memoir featuring, among other things, an account of what he watched on the telly in the old country.
As a lad in Tipperary, young John witnessed the advent of TV in Ireland. For him, puberty and modern life arrived simultaneously: Bat Masterson and The Donna Reed Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart gave way only to airing of the daily angelus. Schooled by the Christian Brothers, he found the world of church, communion and confession informed and enlarged by broadcasts from elsewhere. “It was a mad, carefree way of life those people were living in America. They were afraid of nothing.” Not everyone was happy about it. As one politician famously declared, “There was no sex in Ireland before television.” And, while English Monty Python flew into Irish homes with its circus, more immediate matters also appeared on the screens. There, before all eyes, was the new rising against English rule in the North. Along with Upstairs, Downstairs, TV showed the struggles for Irish rights and women’s rights. It also deferentially presented the first papal visit to the land of St. Patrick, one broadcast that didn’t meet with the author’s approval. Despite all the evocative detail, television is simply the cement that binds a personal coming-of-age story. Doyle was quiet lad who watched and listened avidly to his parents and the colorful townsfolk in Nenagh Town and Carrick-on-Shannon. Then he was a Dubliner, a college student encountering famous poets and drinkers. Finally, he traveled across the Atlantic to become a Canadian, though he’ll always be an Irishman. Doyle writes with fine Hibernian garrulity and ease, not a bother on him. For an Irish narrative, he’s yer fella.
A bit about old television and a bit more about being Irish, all proficiently presented.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-7867-1814-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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