A perceptive, descriptive portrait of Australia in the 1960s and of the immigrant experience in general.
In this memoir of vertrek, the Dutch word for leaving, first-time author Paulusse recounts his family’s immigration to Australia from the Netherlands in the early 1960s.
Paulusse was baffled by his parents’ decision to move to Australia. After a five-week ocean voyage, the family landed in Melbourne to start a new life but faced difficulties. Struggling to find employment, Paulusse’s father, Piet, worked at disappointing jobs and launched a boat-building business that failed, forcing Paulusse to augment the family income. He emptied the neighbors’ garbage (and sold the porn magazines he found), worked at a butter factory at 13 after lying about his age, and performed menial jobs to help the family manage. Paulusse paints cameos of the people he and his family met, comparing his new Australian acquaintances with his Dutch family and friends, whom the Australians jocularly called “clog wogs.” Australians seemed willing to give anyone, including immigrants, a “fair go” and “mateship,” while the Dutch come across as earnest, hardworking, and frugal but not without humor. Discovering hair in his food at the Australian assimilation camp where the family first stayed, for instance, Paulusse’s father joked that the dandruff might add flavor to the meal. This resilience, along with determination and persistence, allowed the family to survive if not always thrive. Paulusse repeats himself occasionally and makes some spelling mistakes, e.g. “Manderin” and “plagerized.” Sometimes he doesn’t explain enough—for instance, about his own curious birth with two stomachs or what might have caused his young sister’s unexpected death. But the book’s strengths outweigh its weaknesses. It’s loaded with perceptive portraits of the Australians and Dutch Paulusse knew and descriptions of his family’s struggles. The book also provides an ambivalent take on assimilation and the so-called advances of modern life compared with “a quieter, more stable time.” Overall, these memorable anecdotes are told with empathy and laced with wit and warmth.
A perceptive, descriptive portrait of Australia in the 1960s and of the immigrant experience in general.Pub Date: March 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1499031751
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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