An unfocused account that is intermittently moving but terribly unbalanced.
A disjointed memoir of an Irish-American childhood in rural Massachusetts during the 1950s and ’60s.
In the first half of her narrative, newcomer Blais offers recollections of her father (a successful physician who died of cancer when she was five) and recounts anecdotes from her experiences at a Catholic school. Her mother, Maureen, was reluctant to remarry or work outside the home after her husband’s death, so she raised her six children on the proceeds of her husband’s life insurance policy and the charity of relatives. They didn’t starve, but they had to resign themselves to eating “cheaper tuna” and a dessert they called “dogfood.” As the eldest sister, the author was also the cruelest—shamelessly given to tormenting her sister Jacqueline (she defaced her diary, mocked her for being homesick at summer camp, and forced her to study the catechism in the dark). Blais feared only her eldest brother Raymond, a temperamental high-school dropout. After Raymond was mysteriously discharged from the Air Force, he began to show signs of mental illness and he was dependent on psychiatric drugs for the remainder of his life. His daily battles with his affliction soon come to dominate the narrative, and the author’s other three siblings remain more or less faceless by comparison. There are other characters of importance in this story (the author’s husband, for one), but they are all more or less overlooked as the narrative jumps through decades and bypasses significant events.
An unfocused account that is intermittently moving but terribly unbalanced.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-792-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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