In this raw, to-hell-and-back memoir the enormously talented granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway describes, among other things, how she has fished some of the waters—Key West, the Big Two-Hearted River—her grandfather loved, and battled the same self-destructive alcoholism that haunted him. Hemingway’s often hard life formed the framework for her first novel, Walking Into the River (1992). Like the protagonist in that tale, she had a drunken, dissolute mother and an abusive stepfather, a man she despised. Aunt Freda, the family member she is closest to, once even took a shot at him. Hemingway describes herself as a “dark child,” one adults regarded “as they would a rabid Chihuahua.” She had a penchant for eating anything from night crawlers to river mud. Her parents divorced when she was six. A rebellious teenager, she ran away and secretly contacted her father, Gregory. Ernest Hemingway’s youngest son suffered severe depression and, as she discovered, “liked to dress in women’s clothes.” By early adulthood, Hemingway had done jail time, been “raped and dumped in a backwoods in Georgia,” spent time in drug rehab, sold drugs, stolen cars, and ridden “with baby-eating bikers.” She married and had a child in the 1970s, but drinking—and her obsession with fishing—would continue to plague her. Deep-sea fishing became a passion, and in 1980 she founded a tournament in Key West. A “bombastic, conscience-free, ego-driven alcoholic,” she would fish the Big Two-Hearted River on assignment for a magazine but, as often happened, her drinking nearly ruined the trip. A feisty, dying Aunt Freda offered her a freezerful of home-grown, medicinal marijuana, not to smoke but to sell so that she could pay for treatment for her alcoholism. Hemingway’s brief but harrowing description of her stay in a detoxification center in January 1988 and her joy at “being free” of the addiction climaxes this frank, powerful memoir.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-82255-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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