Keenly observed and well-written—readers will hope that a sequel is forthcoming.
A small-town lad’s awakening, sexual and intellectual—which takes him to big-city demimondes and books that begged, in their day, to be banned.
An autobiographical memoir? Rechy may be thinking of Kenneth Rexroth’s “autobiographical novel,” or perhaps recent memoirs that turn out to be fictions and fictions that turn out to be memoirs. (Before the story begins, the author notes, “This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection.”) Of mixed Scottish and Mexican descent, Rechy grew up in 1940s Texas, where the ethnic combination would mean segregation. But he was always taken for white, which got him in the good high school and even landed him a steamy encounter with his journalism teacher. Rechy’s good fortunes would not be met by his more obviously Hispanic kin: “Although other families in El Paso had struggled out of extreme poverty to moderate poverty during the war,” he writes, “ours seemed entrenched.” With few prospects and another war to fight, Rechy found himself in the army, where, improbably, he met among his fellow soldiers writers, directors, producers and publishers who encouraged his writing and, in some instances, his newly discovered homosexuality and the soul-searching it occasioned (“I’m not queer, man, I’m straight”). A soft job as an aide to a colonel anxiously awaiting advancement—“My main function was to report to him weekly, from an issued list, how many other high colonels were ahead of him to be promoted to generals”—took Rechy to Europe, where he acquired a touch more sophistication. A return to civilian life took him home, where, in the government housing where his mother lived, he wrote City of Night, a hallmark of beat-era and gay literature.
Keenly observed and well-written—readers will hope that a sequel is forthcoming.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1861-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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