A small treasure, both Edmundson’s portrait of Lears and his high-relief, visceral snapshot of Medford.
The wry and affecting story of the teacher who got under the author’s skin and pointed his life in a new direction, much for the better.
Frank Lears materialized at Medford (Massachusetts) High School in the autumn of 1969 and poured a little Socratic juice into the lives of his students, Edmundson (Nightmare on Main Street, 1997, etc.) being one of those lucky enough to soak some of it up. Drawing an exquisite picture of the stark social dynamics in working-class Medford (his grandmother, a chambermaid who cleaned rooms at Radcliffe, was sometimes given unwanted clothing by the students and referred to it as shopping at Cumlaude), Edmundson remembers that the students lived to torment their teachers and strove to “turn everyday life into a species of our favorite diversion, television.” Edmundson highlights what a freak Lears was: He disdained the students’ bear-baiting while managing to open doors for them; he never curried their favor, though he always listened to their rare utterances intently, utterances that increased slowly throughout the year. A product of the late-’60s Harvard, Lears dealt from a whole new deck, encouraging his students to think, to take up a distanced position from their tribal beliefs to give them an unconventional look, to shape a personality and a distinct vision. Edmundson appreciates that the age was ripe for such a transformation. Yet he is still filled with admiration that a teacher was willing to point his students toward Kesey and Ginsberg and Malcolm X and then convey to them somehow that they must each find their own way, staying true to themselves, however full of danger such projects might be. As a teacher of English at the University of Virginia, the author measures himself against an impressive standard.
A small treasure, both Edmundson’s portrait of Lears and his high-relief, visceral snapshot of Medford.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50407-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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