A thought-provoking memoir about the significance of literature in life.
A distinguished fiction writer traces the relationship between significant periods in her life and the novels she was reading during those defining times.
From the time she was a child, Hill (MFA Program/Sarah Lawrence Coll. Who Occupies This House, 2010, etc.) had a sense that events unfolding around her were “inside a story.” The first time she experienced the way life and art mirrored each other was in a seventh-grade music class. Around the time her teacher told students about the accident that ended her career as a concert pianist, Hill immersed herself in Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart. The heroine's accidental drowning prepared the author for the death of a friend’s father, who committed suicide by jumping into the town reservoir. When she was 23, she traveled to Nigeria with her husband to teach. There, she encountered Things Fall Apart and learned about Nigeria’s racist colonial history, all without fully realizing how deeply implicated her own “right-thinking” country was in that brutal past. Reading A Portrait of a Lady cast her own innocence, both about colonial Africa and her own rushed union with her husband, into uncomfortable relief: like slavery, “marriage involved...the desire…to bend another’s will to the requirements of one’s own.” On a later trip to France, the author was drawn to Madame Bovary and the female protagonist who believed that reality “hover[ed] just beyond reach”; and then to Diary of a Country Priest, which offered her insight into how she had been looking at the people around her “through the lens of fear” rather than love. But it would be À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which she read many years later to a nearly blind Diana Trilling, that would cause her to think more deeply about the mysteries of life. Eloquent and searching, Hill’s book explores the strange and wondrous resonances between the read and lived while celebrating reading itself as among the most profoundly transformative of human acts.
A thought-provoking memoir about the significance of literature in life.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-883285-72-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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