A wonderfully warped grab bag of memories from a wilder and weirder time.
Noted cult writer Saknussemm’s (Reverend America, 2012, etc.) darkly funny, offbeat memoir of growing up around San Francisco in the 1960s.
It's immediately evident that we’re dealing with a poet who’s operating in a sublimely blurred space between poetry and prose. The opening sentences of many of these fractured vignettes are some of the most strangely evocative lead-ins out there: “I turned ten inside a giant tire, honoring the engineers and earthmoving machines of the Oroville Land Dam, and a memorial to a mummified Indian chief who disintegrated into dust the moment he was exposed.” So goes the amusingly confounding opening of the short piece “Fire and Forget,” in which the author recalls his life at 10, when he was apprehensive of both the future and the past, just wanting to hide away until everything made sense again. Much of Saknussemm’s early childhood, as captured in short sketches and longer, more essayistic remembrances, often seems little more than common childhood horseplay, but filtered through the author’s undeniably funhouse-mirror sensibilities. Nevertheless, there are some truly singular incidents that almost read like a West Coast take on Southern Gothic fiction (especially the scene involving the author as a young kid finding the bloody severed limb of an amputee friend). The autobiographical sketches that cover the author’s early adult years are full of the sort of boozing, drugging and sexcapades one would naturally expect from an alcoholic preacher’s son. Highlights from these years include the author’s stint as a soul radio DJ (“Mr. Very Late Night”) and a Henry Miller–esque romp through Saknussemm’s many sexual conquests as a randy college professor.
A wonderfully warped grab bag of memories from a wilder and weirder time.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59376-448-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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