A troubling account of the search for roots in the racially and psychologically complex American South. Hunt, a novelist (Free, 1992, Joy, 1991) and actress (Hair), and, it must be noted in obeisance to the rules of American celebrity worship, the mother of Mick Jagger's first child, is an intelligent, responsible writer. She discovers that her family's deepest secret is an ``insane,'' long-institutionalized woman, Hunt's grandmother, still alive in a nursing home in Memphis. Hunt flies from her home in France to meet Ernestine, a tiny woman over 90, usually silent, withdrawn, perhaps unreachable. Ernestine is living in a small private nursing home in substandard conditions, her upkeep paid for by her dead husband's mistress. A host of disturbing questions about Ernestine's history, and Hunt's family, unfold. Was Ernestine, who has been institutionalized since the 1920s, ever really insane? Or did she just suffer from a combination of postpartum depression and her husband's wish to get her out of the way? Hunt stresses the role of color in this story. Ernestine was a blond, blue-eyed black woman born to a dark mother who was ambivalent about her daughter's appearance. Hunt's research takes her all the way back to the antebellum South and up to the life and tragic death of her father, Ernestine's son, a Harvard- educated psychiatrist. While much of what Hunt uncovers could only be seen as a tragedy, the conclusion does offer a faint note of triumph: Ernestine gains a family of sorts. And Hunt, who recovers and brings to light so much family history, is someone we are glad to come to know, a kind of Everywoman. Repossessing Ernestine reads at times like a cross between a confessional article in a woman's magazine and a detective novel. It's not literature, but it is honest, energetic, and profoundly evocative of the deep, deep psychological imprint of the question of color in the South. (b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017443-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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