A bittersweet memoir of growing up absurd in rural Mississippi, then suffering the slings and arrows of marriage and fatherhood, from the popular author of such vivid fiction as Music of the Swamp (1991) and Lightning Song (1997). Deftly mingling entertaining anecdotes with probing self-analysis, Nordan creates a commendably frank revelation of the ways in which a marked tendency toward impulsive behavior has enhanced and troubled his life. The early chapters are rich in colloquial humor, portraying only-child “Buddy” Nordan’s upbringing in the nowhere Delta town of Itta Bena, where the appearance of the first local TV set causes a sensation, and the existence of racism first becomes real for Buddy once he hears stories about the notorious Emmett Till murder case (later the subject of Nordan’s fine novel Wolf Whistle, 1993). There are further ominous foreshadowings in the irreversibly depressed figure of Buddy’s mild-mannered alcoholic stepfather, and in scattershot intimations of the preadolescent Lewis’s seemingly interconnected obsession with sex, frequent irrational anger, and fascination with violence (hence his title). Generic accounts of young-adult high jinks (like locking himself out of a hotel room while drunk and naked) occupy the book’s meandering midsection, but are succeeded by increasingly candid descriptions of recovering from a nearly fatal automobile accident (in which the other driver was killed, as Nordan learned when the man’s widow unaccountably visited him in the hospital), a promising first marriage that ended in divorce, “the enormity of . . . [his eldest] son’s suicide” (provoked, Nordan realized, by his own alcoholism, infidelity, and parental failure), and his successful remarriage, literary career, and peacemaking with both his own demons and the erosions of aging. Some painful truth telling, and an eye-opening explanation of how one writer’s complicated psyche came to be, in a worthy piece of personal history that’s also a helpful gloss on Nordan’s distinctive novels and stories. (First serial to Harper’s and Oxford American)
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2000
ISBN: 1-56512-199-6
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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