Charming and often moving—will appeal to a broad range of readers, from fans of Wendell Berry to those of Toni Morrison.
A sometimes exasperated, sometimes joyful account of a daughter’s reconnecting with a father across lines of generation, ethnicity, geography and family history.
The genre of memoirs by adult baby-boomer children tending to their infirm, elderly parents is likely to be a growth industry in the near future. Funderburg (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race, 1994) sets the critical bar high with this account of homecoming, in this case to her father’s farm in the Georgia countryside. Born in 1926, a light-hued African-American who passed for white farther north, George Funderburg had fled from there decades earlier. He “picked tobacco in Connecticut, sold cookbooks in Columbus, and...took the job I most liked to hear about, on a Detroit Night Boat,” writes his daughter, to say nothing of gaining a Wharton education and marrying across a then strict color line to produce three daughters. Dad explains his trajectory with an admirable motto: “I never wanted anybody to tell me what to do.” Along the way, though, he lost his family. Now, as Dad, ailing with cancer, prepares for his end, he passes along some of the other lessons he has learned in life, most along the lines of respecting other people, paying as well as you can and keeping mind and body active. Dad is a character, and his daughter is a gracious storyteller who holds his eccentricities at a humorous but never ironic distance. For instance, he is a man of deeply felt if transient enthusiasms who makes projects of all sorts of things (“If there’s an instructional video, all the better”), including an ingenious meat smoker from which the book takes its title, producing pork so sugary that it’s like candy. As Dad begins to decline, daughter finds more in their past to wrestle with, lending tension to an already perfectly plotted and well-paced memoir.
Charming and often moving—will appeal to a broad range of readers, from fans of Wendell Berry to those of Toni Morrison.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4766-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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