An uneven amalgam of memoir, storybook and picture album.
Kestin (Hammy, 2012) offers an illustrated memoir about her 1940s childhood.
Mary Kestin is “three fingers old” and living on a Montana farm as the story begins. Her parents soon move the family to Cheney, Wash., to complete their studies at a teachers’ college, and the book ends before Mary turns 5, when her parents receive their degrees. The tale is structured like a scrapbook, with each short chapter providing a snapshot of a minor event. Kestin’s early life on the farm includes recollections of gathering eggs, playing in fields and a minor farm accident. In Washington, mischievous Mary learns about city life in “A Rope Lesson.” In “‘M’ is for Mary,” the author vividly portrays her first writing experience (“I am the boss of the pencil!”); this epiphany is particularly noteworthy, as the author grows up to be an accomplished visual artist. The poems that end each chapter are less effective, as they often attempt to synthesize nuanced content into simplistic ditties, such as, “Mary has a red berry that makes her tongue cherry and her fingers scary.” Many anxieties slip into the stories, as well; for example, Mary doesn’t understand why her daddy doesn’t like to hug her; her grandmother clearly favors her sister; and she learns that her uncle fell asleep on the couch after drinking too much, which made her aunt mad. Such remembrances may be disquieting for younger readers. However, the author does effectively portray a child’s point of view, as when young Mary sits in the dirt: “I’m plowing a corn field with a table fork. My cow is an empty wooden spool of thread with a long string tied around the middle. I can pull my cow through my fields.” However, adults reading aloud may be stumped to decipher the line, “I want the isinglass egg that the sick boy received with the hole in it that showed a picture of Easter.”
An uneven amalgam of memoir, storybook and picture album.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492222149
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
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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