Reader-friendly memoir by an author equally at home on the page and on the stage.
With ambivalent Irish-American panache, a politically oriented rock musician recounts his life in County Wexford and New York City.
Kirwan (the novel Liverpool Fantasy, 2003) is a songwriter-singer in the band Black 47. While growing up in Catholic and predictable Wexford during the 1950s, he enjoyed the security of the familiar and was a devoted member of his family, whom he writes about here—his parents, and especially his grandfather—in phrases alternately rollicking and sentimental. Describing his youth, he relies on vivid, memorable language and frequently irreverent images, as he does throughout (“Wexford, in those days, would have left Calcutta breathless in its devotion and adherence to an ironclad caste system. The only comfort was that everyone had someone else to look down on”). Despite his contentedness, restlessness overtook Kirwan, and he moved as a young adult to New York City to seek new experience, including work as a professional musician. Like memoirists before him, he describes the brotherhood among and the conflicts between native-born Irish on the one hand and Irish-Americans on the other, who never lived in the homeland. Frank and Malachy McCourt are among such figures, and Kirwan works them and hundreds of other memorable folks—known to him personally or by reputation only—into his text. Some get their own chapters, with the late rock-music critic Lester Bangs receiving especially full treatment. Bangs didn’t understand the performing part of music—“I might as well have been talking to Billy Carter about the influence of serialism on Philip Glass”—but the critic knew on a gut level what he liked and who would succeed, including Black 47. The band caught on in clubs throughout the Bronx, and Kirwan moves past stereotype in describing the richness of that oft-maligned borough. His obligatory account of living in Manhattan during 9/11 slows the lively narrative but can’t kill it.
Reader-friendly memoir by an author equally at home on the page and on the stage.Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-644-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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