Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.
A literary son traces his fugitive father in a pulpy yet cerebral memoir.
Novelist Di Prisco (The Alzhammer, 2016, etc.) roots this sequel to his previous memoir, Subway to California (2014), in his serendipitous discovery of a raft of trial transcripts concerning his father, a small-time criminal and gambling addict who helped crooked New York City cops shake down bookmakers and then testified against them, apparently receiving consideration for his own offenses. This explained the family’s flight during his childhood from Brooklyn to California but opened up numerous other questions for him. “My father didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but it was close,” writes the author. “It was on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the hardscrabble fifties where he made his bones.” The memoir’s strongest aspect is this unsparing portrait of his family as a whirl of combative intensity. Although Di Prisco always saw his father as “unmanageable, impulsive, bottled-up, unhinged,” his volatile mother and his brother (who himself became a career criminal and heroin addict) considered him “a liar and a con man, a chump and a loser.” The author relies on the trial transcripts (and other primary sources such as family letters) to evoke both a vanished urban era and a seamy moral landscape of casual criminality: “All of us kids knew of the hit man who lived on the block.” Yet, despite his father’s lifelong gambling habit and tendency toward prevarication, he redeemed himself later in life as a labor union executive, winning nine consecutive elections: “He took pride in the job and worked very hard….His Brother Teamster leaders always spoke of him in laudatory terms.” This sprawling narrative is punctuated by Di Prisco’s reflections on literature, faith, mortality, and his own tangled romances and outré experiences, ranging from cocaine addiction to mentoring adolescents. When his father died after their relationship had finally stabilized, he wondered, “for whom, besides myself, am I writing this book?”
Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-11-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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