A literary memoir of purest sense and sensitivity.
The highly crafted first installment of a projected three-volume memoir from one of the most respected and least known voices in American letters.
“I’m trying to write a memoir that gets beneath the self-consciousness of self,” Woiwode (Indian Affairs, 1992, etc.) writes in the opening pages his story. First, he narrates the rigors of a particularly harsh recent winter at his home in North Dakota, followed by a brief chapter that addresses spiritual matters. Then he shifts back to his academic career at the University of Illinois and the considerable success he enjoyed in the theater before he found his voice as a writer and his path to New York, where with encouragement from William Maxwell at the New Yorker he developed and published his first fiction. In his account, Woiwode breaks through the foreground—interrupting the present with the past, or vice versa—to establish a secondary narrative thread. He depicts all action in the present tense throughout, cutting back and forth between “then” and “now” with the abruptness of film montage. Although the technique takes getting used to, each narrative develops distinctively and richly in theme and character; no matter how suddenly he leaves and returns from one “time” to the other, the book unfolds with sure control and clarity. He turns his gaze on the figures in his life—his family, his friends (including the young Robert DeNiro), his teachers (Maxwell especially), and himself—with the honesty and unconditional love that his mentor tells him writers must have. His affection for (and obligation to) Maxwell emerges with little sentimentality; the larger themes—loss, struggle, and love—become powerful through the virtues of language and insight as pure and sharp as the air on a clear December morning. At times that air gets a bit rarefied, but the rewards are worth the risk.
A literary memoir of purest sense and sensitivity.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-07848-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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