Amazing and alarming, though dripping at times with the treacle of a personal-redemption memoir.
Award-winning essayist, screenwriter and novelist Richard (Charity, 1997, etc.) revisits his life and career, recording how Christianity has played an ever enlarging role.
The author zooms through his remarkably busy life in fewer than 200 pages, employing second-person pronouns throughout, the you almost always referring to the author—e.g., “The first time you are arrested is for assaulting a police officer.” Born in Louisiana, Richard had a skeletal malformation that required many surgeries, well into adulthood (some paid for by Jacqueline Onassis). His father worked in the lumber industry and always had great, unrealized plans. Richard’s mother bought him piles of library books during his long periods of recovery in bed. School did not appeal to him (many of his teachers believed him “special”—and not in a positive way), but he staggered through high school and beyond, worked a motley assortment of summer jobs and drifted into substance abuse, crime and disarray. (At times, Richard sounds like a Southern version of Frederick Exley.) A voracious reader and a wannabe writer, he possessed talent and enjoyed the good fortune of meeting writers like Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and Truman Capote. Esquire editor Rust Hills helped him, and, slowly, his career emerged. He eventually married, had children, earned success, some fame and many sojourns in Hollywood. God appears in the story early and increasingly often. Richard credits much of his good fortune to the Lord, suggests angels saved him from a mugging and believes—though never says directly—that he is Chosen. The memoir ends with his heavy financial and emotional investments in the House of Prayer Holiness Church, a small African-American church in Virginia, a place frequented by his mother.
Amazing and alarming, though dripping at times with the treacle of a personal-redemption memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-51302-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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