A text that will appeal to those fond of memoirs about coming of age in the Depression and World War II.
The nonagenarian author of scores of books about travel and history returns with a memoir about his boyhood, youth, and World War II.
Freely (Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World, 2011, etc.), who has a doctorate in physics and taught the subject for decades in Istanbul, displays an unusually precise memory of events from boyhood. After sketching the immigrant stories of his Irish mother and father, the author mentions books he read as a 6-year-old, including The Last of the Mohicans, and he reproduces conversations from the 1930s onward. Such specificity adds an almost surreal clarity to the text. Freely writes about his successes and failures in school, his family’s deep financial difficulties (they lived in a series of unpleasant dwellings), and some of his rough boyhood jobs—e.g., delivering papers (often to customers disinclined to pay), a gig in a paint factory, a stock clerk. In this final position, a woman supervisor grabbed him by the testicles and welcomed him to the job. Freely developed an early love for Homer—especially The Odyssey—and allusions to that work (and its hero) appear continually. He enlisted in the Navy, with his mother’s reluctant consent, and the final two-thirds of the text relate those experiences—training, friends, scrapes with the authorities, and his experiences abroad, including some dangerous work along the Stilwell Road and the Burma Road. He saw horrors everywhere. Throughout the book, Freely treats many details of his experiences with an equality that they don’t always deserve—readers will yearn for more emphasis at times, since all memories are not created equal. An error in the epigraph: he attributes to Keats a poem by Longfellow.
A text that will appeal to those fond of memoirs about coming of age in the Depression and World War II.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49470-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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