While somewhat uneven in organization and recollection, this book remains an important historical document and a reminder of...
A debut memoir offers insights into relocation during World War II and glimpses of subsequent life in Austria and the United States.
Smolik was born in 1942 in Vocin, Yugoslavia. Two years later, as local fighting intensified, she and her family—two sisters, mother, and maternal grandparents—moved to Dresden, where they remained until just before the 1945 bombing of that city. The family was relocated to Austria, reunited with Smolik's now ex–prisoner-of-war father, and stayed briefly in various refugee camps until settling in a village near Steyr. In 1952, through the International Refugee Organization, they moved to rural Iowa and then to Des Moines. Smolik admits to recalling little of Yugoslavia, the war, and the early years in Germany and Austria, events that constitute the first half of her book. Nonetheless, she draws on historical records and her older sister’s recollections to aptly describe the tumult of displacement and the wherewithal required to maintain family life, faith, and tradition in a new country. Not surprisingly, Smolik’s writing is most poignant when relating her own, very childlike memories of this time: decorating the Christmas tree with apples, eating roasted snails, receiving tooth powder in an aid package at school. The second half of the volume describes life as a new immigrant in the U.S.: early days as a fourth-grader who knew little English and few American customs and later years as a high school and university student. At times, these later accounts—of friends, shopping, dances, church—read like those of any young girl in 1950s Iowa, perhaps a testament to Smolik’s acclimatization. Yet she always circles back to how war has shaped her and her family. She calls herself “both a casualty and a survivor” of World War II, a many-layered “haystack” buffeted by external events yet strong at the core. Despite occasional lapses into encyclopedialike summaries of history, religion, and geography, Smolik’s writing is clear and her narrative compelling.
While somewhat uneven in organization and recollection, this book remains an important historical document and a reminder of the lasting effects of displacement.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-4034-5
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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