American expatriate Green records searing conflicts between heart and spirit as he finally comes to recognize his sexual identity in this third volume of autobiography (The Green Paradise, 1992; The War at Sixteen, 1993). Though born and raised in France, Green was filled by his American parents with tales of family history and Southern lore. So, arriving on these shores in 1919, Green felt instinctively at home, especially in the South. In old family residences in Virginia and Savannah he met relatives, viewed treasured memorabilia, and savored the distinctively southern ethics his parents had imbued in him. But as a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Green was less sure of his place. Though only 19, he had fought in WW I, his sensibility and tastes were European, and he missed France; but, he admits, looking out over Charlottesville on his first morning, ``devoted as I was to France, I recognized that a part of me had no other origin than the country in which I now found myself.'' Shy and self-conscious, Green at first avoided his fellow students and concentrated instead on his classes and spiritual growth. A devout convert to Catholicism, he considered becoming a priest, but he was also agonizingly conscious of his intense attraction to young men. And his unsparing recollections of his sexual ignorance, his desperate attempts to subsume his feelings in religious practice, and his growing awareness of the existence of others like him, make this volume a remarkable record of self-discovery. Finally able to befriend- -platonically—his beloved Mark, who ``reappears constantly'' in his later writings, Green finds a measure of contentment before returning to France. Self-portrait of the artist as a young man, rendered with an excoriating candor that makes Green such a master and exemplar of the confessional voice.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-7145-2987-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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