At once poetic and crude, this is a raw story that provides horror and laughter in equal measure.
A collection of darkly comic thumbnail sketches that portray an abusive household from the perspective of a child whose intelligence (and maturity) surpass those of her parents.
It’s hard to believe that St. John is now a New York City art-gallery owner, in light of her impoverished (in every sense) childhood in southern Illinois. She and her three siblings “were white trash hicks with a real weird accent.” They were browbeaten and battered by their father, a hotheaded alcoholic of Irish and Native American descent who squandered his wages at the Rat Hole bar while his starving children dreamt of owning shoes. Her housebound mother, a “half wit” Hungarian war bride, was just as bad, hoarding doughnuts at P.T.A meetings and smacking her children (who she nicknamed “mud ball,” “hog,” and “Blumpsen, which means fat sausage in German”). St. John narrates her early life in an unrefined native dialect, describing outhouse adventures with an irate rooster, her hillbilly grandmother’s first visit to a grocery store, and the “boots” they made of plastic bags for her younger sibling. There are hilarious episodes illustrating her mother’s inability to assimilate into American culture and her father’s backwoods ways, but sometimes the black humor is outweighed by horror—especially when she describes the injuries her female relatives received at the hands of violent or drunken husbands. Throughout her chaotic narration, the tragedy of four pathetic children futilely waiting to receive their parents’ affections emerges. St. John blatantly acknowledges her yearning for her father’s recognition, but her feelings for her mother remain ambiguous. And it is uncertain, in the end, whether she really transcended her rustic origins at all: despite a college education and her later highbrow career, the author’s description of her own drinking habits, unplanned pregnancy, and abusive lover suggest that, in some regards, she followed in her parents’ footsteps.
At once poetic and crude, this is a raw story that provides horror and laughter in equal measure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018631-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
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
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