Childhood memories with a nightmarish tinge.
An Appalachian memoir suffused with atomic energy.
Early on in this brief narrative, Freeman (Sociology/Simon Fraser Univ.; Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia, 2015) writes, “I want to revive a peculiar genre—sociological poetry,” a term she attributes to C. Wright Mills in describing James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book is substantively different than Agee’s, though it has plenty of photos (Agee collaborated with the famed photographer Walker Evans), drawings, and assorted cultural references. It is more like a tone poem, a slim volume filled with very short sections—vignettes, memories—that seem to follow no chronological pattern yet keep circling back to the fact that in her grandparents’ hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear power was ubiquitous, like oxygen, so you barely noticed it. It was only in retrospect that the author realized the deadly connection between this “secret city engineered by the United States government,” with the deceivingly pastoral name, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. “For those of us in its orbit,” she writes, “its spinning is our spinning; its hard acorn body, always already full of future potential, is also our collective body, as we embody culture and place.” Within the book’s analytical orbit, Walter Benjamin and Icarus connect with R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and Adam Bomb from the Garbage Pail Kids finds something of a kindred spirit in the comic-book superhero Captain Atom. Readers also learn that the co-founder of Waffle House “worked as a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. government during the Manhattan Project,” and the author’s own grandfather was an atomic courier, driving his truck full of secret cargo. The result is by no means an anti-nuclear polemic, but the cumulative impact of the matter-of-fact sections gives readers a Cold War chill at the cultural pervasiveness of such destructive energy.
Childhood memories with a nightmarish tinge.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0689-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Redwood Press/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
