Since 1975, when his younger brother Robby was arrested (and later jailed) for armed robbery and murder, professor/novelist Wideman (Hurry Home, The Lynchers) has been wrestling with this situation—as a family tragedy, as a sociological puzzle, as a personal torment, as material for his fiction.
Here, then, after long prison-visit talks with Robby, Wideman tries to put it all together—in a dense, restless, tortured mosaic that only occasionally adds illumination to the central knot of anguish. An opening section moves from memories of the 1975 nightmare (a brief visit from fugitive Robby before the arrest) to musings on the brotherly bond, lyrical/earthy vignettes from Pittsburgh family-history, Wideman's guilt over rejecting his black background ("Fear marched along beside guilt"), and an evocation of a visit to Robby in prison. Then, after a strong close-up of Wideman's mother, embittered and "radicalized" by her son's fate, Robby's own recollections take over: childhood jealousy of his successful older siblings, staking out his own territory ("I had to be a rebel"), and becoming a street-smart hood—especially after getting hooked on drugs. ("One day you the King. Next day dope got you and it's the King.") Unfortunately, however, Bobby's confessions—a long, naturalistic drone of shooting up, dealing, stealing—aren't distinctive or revealing enough to deepen the drama here or to help explain the basic mystery: why is one brother a professor in Wyoming, the other in for life at a Pennsylvania penitentiary? And Wideman's own broodings, though sometimes eloquent as they rub salt into the wound, end up pretty much where they begin—despite shifting voices, poetic flights, and verbose, repetitious wrestlings along the way. ("We can't get any further. It's a familiar place. A treacherous convergence of selfishness and caring for another and ego and wanting to be bigger, better than you are and valuing the truth and profiting from untruth and wishing for the best and dreading the worst; a welter of conflicting emotions, a nexus of irresolution and despair, of self-pity and self-disgust, desire and guilt.")
A frustrating book, then—with a powerful initial grab, some of the virtues of fiction (texture and emotion), but only sporadic flickers of drama and insight amid the narrative convolutions.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1984
ISBN: 0618509631
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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
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
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