Radish’s (A Grand Day to Get Lost, 2013, etc.) latest work of nonfiction is a collection of vignettes taken from her own life, from her self-conscious childhood to her days as wild child, hard-boiled reporter and devoted mother.
These stories offer a vast, eclectic array of experience, depicted with the grit and incisiveness of a journalist who’s covered brutal events such as domestic violence, murder and war. Radish’s prose is a joy—energetic, attitudinal, often hilarious and perfectly suited to the anecdotal form. Having met a man claiming to be Jesus, for example, Radish quips, “Well, I’m not dressed for this encounter.” Readers become well-acquainted with the author’s oft-espoused “fearless broad” philosophy, and she’s at her best when recounting experiences in which she takes center stage. In “The Little Girl and the Tomatoes,” for example, she describes a childhood job in which she picked tomatoes in stultifying heat and how it engendered her lifelong sense of tenacity. In “Paper Clips, Two-Sided Paper, My Penis Please,” Radish recounts, with equal parts dark humor and rage, attending the funeral of an editor who sexually assaulted her under the guise of mentorship. However, the essays about marginalized individuals are less convincing, as they present the people almost entirely through Radish’s own perception, projecting attributes, pasts and even afterlives onto them instead of describing their own lived experience. An encounter with writer Eudora Welty, for example, is less about the woman herself than about Radish’s visceral reaction to Welty’s presence and advice, and in “Soldier Boy,” the author recounts a brief encounter with a young soldier about to go to war, imagining a hypothetical trajectory of his life and a detailed scenario for his death.
A bold, rollicking work that often reveals more about the author than her subjects.
Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940716435
Page Count: 240
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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