A diary-style retelling of one year in a unique family’s life that provides insightful, entertaining anecdotes.
A debut author documents a year spent in her eccentric, brainiac father-in-law’s house.
After a messy legal battle involving zoning laws, a rental house, and potential bankruptcy got in the way of their ideal living situation, Byk and her husband, Paul, decided to move in with his elderly father, the beloved and strange Mr. B. Writing in the style of a journal over the first year living in his home, Byk jotted down notes from almost each day detailing her father-in-law’s “scientific calculations, wry humor and colloquialisms from the Greatest Generation.” At 98, Mr. B had grown up on the East Coast and eventually worked in aerospace engineering. At first, Byk and her husband wondered “how to respond to a rocket scientist,” but Mr. B soon taught the author about zeppelins, pickles, and his tough Polish mother. As she began to drive Mr. B around, opening up his horizons to new foods and experiences, she learned even more about the incredible science he was involved in that changed the entire world. She also found out about the terrible wartime repercussions caused by his work that in some ways still haunt him, like the parts of planes he designed that ended up killing gunners in World War II. Throughout every small story describing a dinner or politically incorrect joke, Byk fully constructs Mr. B, from the Rhode Island coastal awe in his voice to his penchant for mustard on peeled egg—which forces her to “close [her] eyes against a rising shudder.” In these small, perfectly executed moments, Byk brings her fascinating family to life for readers with warm and genuinely funny wit. But no matter how well told these sketches and idiosyncrasies are, they never quite come together to make a larger, more substantial narrative. Although Byk becomes more patient, learns a lot about engineering, and finds newfound respect for the Greatest Generation’s frugalness, these episodes never offer the same emotionally powerful transformation that classics like Tuesdays With Morrie deliver to show the impact one generation can have on another.
A diary-style retelling of one year in a unique family’s life that provides insightful, entertaining anecdotes.Pub Date: March 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9971625-6-1
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Capture Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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