Winner of the Australian/Vogel Award (1989) for her first novel, Mood Indigo, and recently named one of the ten Best Young Australian Novelists by the Sydney Morning Herald, Sayer makes her American debut with this compelling memoir of her experiences while living on the edge with her father as a busker in the magical, menacing underworlds of New Orleans and the streets of New York. Sayer’s father was a jazz drummer in Australia. His intermittent here-one-minute-gone-the-next presence and his legends of excess while anywhere but beside his unstable family drove Mandy to seek him out. Together they set out for the streets of New York. Tap dancing to his drum riffs, negotiating his down-times of alcohol and drugs as well as the up-times of cocaine-induced ambition and frenzied visions of success, Sayer “became a lodger in my father’s castle . . . surrendering . . . to the indomitable architecture of his imagination.” Her narrative voice is vivacious and exact, no matter how grim the tales she tells. There are many points in the book when Sayer finds her younger self tempted to undermine her artistic voice in favor of her father’s pull toward self-destruction. Her poetic style captures the stench of the flophouse, the grinding ache of feet that have tapped the sheen off the pavement, and the reality of life for a young girl who continues to yearn, blindly, for her father’s love. Love does indeed save her, but it is self-love, her determination to finally and forever distance herself from her father’s dreamtime dance. She becomes at last “her own magician,” finding a liberating power in the magic of words. This memoir is about finding magic in the voice of expression. It is an incredibly vivid tale, filled with gutsy ingenuity and the stark range of emotion that Sayer survives. Her will to be heard may be tap-danced to her father’s drum but it echoes clear off the page. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42332-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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