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
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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