Often charming, occasionally moving, but mainly a book about not much that hasn’t happened to pretty much everyone and which...
A portrait of the author as a seventh-grader who’s a little more sensitive but otherwise not much different than most.
In his acknowledgements, novelist Brockmeier (The Illumination, 2011, etc.) categorizes this as an “odd little memoir-novel-thing,” which serves as an apt description. It is a coming-of-puberty account of the seventh-grade school year, one that finds friends turning to bullying, acquaintances becoming friends and girls remaining unattainable. “Kevin is good with stories and always has been,” he writes of the protagonist of this narrative, the only character who is fully developed; he’s as self-conscious as most adolescents are during a stage of such tumultuous change. He has spent the summer with his father and returns to the home he shares with his mother and brother to find that everything has changed: music, slang, activities, allegiances. Of course, that will all change and change again, and those he considered his friends will ridicule him the most, finding “the softest tools they can use to hurt him,” a milder form of what would now be recognized as bullying. “He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily,” writes Brockmeier, but “he is trying hard not to be him anymore, that kid.” The pivotal chapter takes the nonfictional form of magical realism, anticipating Kevin’s future, putting his (then) present crises in perspective and offering him a choice that could change the course of his existence. Otherwise, it’s a book about coming to terms, accepting that “it’s too late for you to become a different person. You’ll never be tall, and you’ll never be strong.” But he will become a writer, which is what he was even back then.
Often charming, occasionally moving, but mainly a book about not much that hasn’t happened to pretty much everyone and which pretty much everyone has survived.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-90898-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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