Plangent as the tolling of bells, expressively struck in a resonant voice.
Poet Skoyles’s debut memoir indelibly recalls the summer he came of age and then raced beyond.
The author was 16 in 1965 and living with his mother in Queens. That summer, Mom’s brother Fred decided to take John under his wing and put a little worldliness into him. Uncle Fred wasn’t exactly a gangster, but the shade tended to collect around him. He introduced his nephew to bourbon and sex, to middleweight contenders, late-night radio hosts, and bookies. He tendered advice: “Never apologize, remember that. Things are too complicated for any one person to take the blame”; “Why should [you] go to college? The city's an encyclopedia, and it's free.” Fred was cool enough in John’s eyes to make Kerouac fade, but he was also unpredictable (“I had never seen anyone change so quickly, from grieved to astonished to ecstatic”), and he was an ex-con who ducked when cops walked by. John’s Aunt Linda wasn’t happy about her brother being her nephew’s tutor—“With Fred, every gift has a long ribbon,” she warned—and besides, she wanted to administer some tutoring of her own, a sex-education workshop with herself as the guide. John learned much from Aunt Linda, and not just about bras, garter belts, and female anatomy; he also got an introduction to ritual flagellation. Stirred like a martini, the boy was dazed and enthralled by the time it all ended with the close of August. The summer wasn’t all uncles and aunts—friends and a young woman rounded out the picture—but it was all sensual, emotional turbulence, and Skoyles (Writing/Emerson Coll.) squarely nails the bewildering resonance of a dramatic season when veils were ruefully lifted. A nice addition to Nebraska’s American Lives series edited by Tobias Wolff.
Plangent as the tolling of bells, expressively struck in a resonant voice.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-8032-4304-9
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
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