A tender evocation of an extraordinary life.
As Thomas Carew lost his memory to dementia, his daughter embarked on a search to find a man she hardly knew.
Throughout her childhood, Carew reveals in her captivating debut memoir, her father was a man who could fix anything and solve any problem. Energetic, ingenious, and charming, he was also unconventional (cheering her occasional truancy from school, for example) and no stickler for decorum or rules. She knew he had been a spy, but until she began to assemble the pieces of his life, she had little idea what that meant. In fact, during World War II, he had been a member of the Jedburghs, an elite international corps that parachuted into France to aid the resistance fighters and into Burma to hold back the Japanese. “I was one of the first good terrorists,” Tom later told an interviewer. In charge of “ambushes, explosives, and small-arms instructions,” he engaged in missions that were chaotic and frighteningly dangerous. But among Jedburghs and other guerrilla fighters, and when leading his team into Japanese-occupied Burma, he claimed to feel more alive than he ever would feel again. Burma proved much more challenging than France. “To start with,” writes the author, “it would be impossible for the Jeds to blend in; and even if they kept themselves hidden, their great big footprints would give them away.” Carew recounts the Jedburghs’ role in Burmese political upheaval, smoothly weaving that narrative into her family’s unsettled history. Her mother was the second of Tom’s wives, an unstable, unhappy woman who railed against marriage to a man who seemed destined for financial ruin. Carew’s childhood was “curdled with anger…I don’t remember anything but discord.” After Tom left the military, he suffered repeated business failures that left his wife and children vulnerable. The couple eventually divorced, and Tom remarried. Carew is as vicious in her portrayal of this possessive, controlling stepmother as she is empathetic to her father’s loss of his adventuresome past and, more tragically, sense of identity.
A tender evocation of an extraordinary life.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2514-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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