Tensions and tenderness, beautifully rendered.
Poet Gibson (One Body, 2007, etc.) applies keen intellect to the formidable task of recapitulating the essentials of one’s childhood.
In this memoir of family life, specifically the early years with her parents, the author dissects the rights and wrongs and confounding mysteries of parental and sibling relationships. Gibson was raised in Richmond, Va., in the 1950s and ’60s by white, fundamentalist-leaning Christian parents who demonstrated patronizingly (but not aggressively) racist tendencies. Gibson and her sister constantly battled for the attention of their mother, a self-styled “Lady” who exerted constant control as a function of both love and duty. Their father struggled with the pressures of social expectations, class and race. The author’s remarkable facility with the language of emotion and personal insight allows her to share the flow of youthful feelings that began to push her in her own direction, away from the narrowly defined “family values” espoused by her parents. For example, Dad often used his belt as punishment for serious misbehavior or disrespect. In Gibson’s mind, this brutal demonstration of so-called parental love may be compared to the biblical Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac for the love of God. One day, finding herself sequestered in reflection under a lilac bush, watching her father mow the lawn, she realizes: “I could run away and not leave the backyard.” Eventually, however, she does get away physically, and spiritually, from her conventional family and its precepts. Years later, her father overcome by alcoholism and emotional collapse, her sister disabled by a stroke and her mother aging, Gibson returns to find bonds that had never really broken.
Tensions and tenderness, beautifully rendered.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1783-7
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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