The mesmerizing tale of a young Englishwoman's strange life in the backward world of a remote South American sugar plantation during the early 1970s. When St. Aubin de Teran was a mere schoolgirl of 16, she met a political exile from Venezuela, Jaime de Ter·n, a man in his late 30es. He pursued her doggedly and, she agreed to marry him when she was 17. They spent the next three years traveling around Europe with some of his fellow exiles (but without much money). Jaime was an odd character, given to extended bouts of strange behavior, but the ever-flexible teenager made nothing of it. When an amnesty made it possible for him to return home to the family estate—a sugar cane plantation the Andes—he and his child-bride moved there. St. Aubin de Ter·n tells of her years (1971-79) on the feudal Ter·n estate with a small and vulnerable daughter, a fiercely loyal pet buzzard, and a homicidally insane husband. He is the last scion of an ancient (and inbred) aristocratic clan. Managment of the estate fell largely on her inexperienced shoulders. The many families who live in near-servitude on the plantation are impoverished and suffer from terrible diseases in addition to all manner of self-inflicted misfortune. Indeed, the author has enough misfortunes of her own, but they dont get the better of her. This remarkable book is striking for its cannily articulate, vivid, yet always understated prose style. It grips the reader from beginning to end. St. Aubin de Ter·n writes with the dispassionate eye of a cultural anthropologist and the story-telling craftsmanship of the novelist she is (Nocturne, 1993, etc.). One only wishes for more photos than the 19 she supplies. There is no picture of the buzzard, for example, one of the tale's most interesting figures. A memoir of conspicuously powerful narrative force, never sentimental or self-indulgent.
Pub Date: April 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-81634-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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 2025 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.
