Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying.
Novelist Jasper explores the roots and psyche of an African-American family.
As he approached his 30th year, the author (Seeking Salamanca Mitchell, 2004, etc.) had his view of fatherhood irrevocably challenged when his girlfriend became pregnant. He turned to his family’s difficult patriarch, octogenarian Jesse Langley Sr., for insights. What made Granddaddy Jesse so emotionally diffident and cold, despite the fact that he was an adequate husband, father and grandfather for 60 years? Jasper’s grandfather died before Jasper could visit Greenville, N.C., the place where Jesse grew up, lost his parents and gave himself the name the Lone Ranger. The author was left to pry answers from his immediate family. Grandma Sally recalled meeting Jesse, when she was 19, in the Pentagon lunchroom; it was 1940, and they had both moved out of the South to find work in D.C. For all of their married life they lived on Childress Street in the capital. Jasper’s mother Angela, firstborn of three children, held up the example of her father as a responsible provider to her own husband, Melvin, who eventually caved under the pressure and left. (Ironically, Melvin later started another family and stuck with it.) Jasper visited innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, extracting their stories of survival throughout the tumultuous political decades from the civil-rights movement through the sexual revolution and into the present. He found that few of Jesse’s descendants wanted to talk about the emotional toll that being orphaned and black took on him. In colloquial, heavy-handed prose, Jasper veers capriciously from personal history into muddled family chronology, offering plenty of moral slogans and relationship lessons for his contemporaries.
Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7679-1679-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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