Never preachy or self-righteous, Beaver praises the exhilaration of independence while keeping faith always within reach.
A backsliding evangelical Christian shares stories of a warped youth spent shedding religion for adolescent shenanigans in the 1980s.
In his affable, if somewhat tepid, debut memoir, Beaver writes about how his coming-of-age years were pre-empted by church services warning him of eternal damnation unless he devoted his life to Christian salvation. The son of a war veteran and blue-collar Southern Baptist deacon, Beaver’s yearnings for mischief began to stir in his early teens while on an evangelical camping trip. At the weeklong gathering hosted by a pastor busy channeling the power of God, the newly baptized author busied himself with the glorious distraction of a nearby pretty girl “tucked inside a terrycloth towel.” Beaver’s carnal interests were further stoked by a neighborhood friend brandishing a stack of dirty magazines and a new telescope to spy on the frequently topless woman across the street. Whether concerning his adventures in the middle school band or obsessing over scantily clad TV vixen Daisy Duke, Beaver’s anecdotes are consistently breezy and lighthearted, adding warm humor to an already ebullient sketch of his restless adolescence. The memoir’s period detail is also notable, as it describes Georgia’s rampant racial unrest and the trial of unrepentant serial killer Wayne Williams. At 16, Beaver was driving a beat-up Camaro with reckless abandon, and his primary mission was to achieve “vehicular amour” with a girl in the back seat. An ear piercing, prom night, and the loss of his virginity all promised a future of free-spirited years ahead—far away from life stuck in a stifling suburban subdivision. It also signaled a distinct divorce between the author and his staunch evangelical roots. In a contemporary, poignant closing chapter, Beaver joyously welcomes the birth of his daughter just a month after the passing of his father.
Never preachy or self-righteous, Beaver praises the exhilaration of independence while keeping faith always within reach.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938235-19-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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