Coming-of-age hardships skillfully recounted by way of the colloquial Irish tongue.
The story of a poverty-stricken young girl growing up broke—but not broken—in 1950s Dublin.
In the first of four volumes, Long lays the groundwork for the tale of her lifetime of hardships. Just 4 years old at the start of the book, the author had to grow up fast in the extreme poverty that engulfed her. Born to a teenage mother whose primary talent seemed to be childbearing, Long was forced to do anything she could to survive, including drinking milk from a sibling’s bottle. “Me Ma doesn’t give me anthin te eat these days,” she writes, “so I share the babby’s bottle wit him.” These desperate acts are continually on display throughout the book, and they are made most apparent on the day of Long’s first Communion, when she was told to fast until after receiving the Lord. “I don’t want Holy God,” she wailed, “I want a bit of bread." Yet poverty was but one of many struggles Long faced. The other main one, her cruel-hearted stepfather, Jackser, proved the more complicated of the two. In a particularly horrific scene, Jackser demonstrates his villainy by dangling Long’s baby brother over a bannister to show his resentment at having to take in another man’s children. After much pleading, Jackser relented. “Here, take it,” he grumbles, handing the baby over to its mother. “An count yerself lucky he’s not splattered in the hall.” Yet Long knows little of luck, and her book demonstrates her impressive determination and perseverance.
Coming-of-age hardships skillfully recounted by way of the colloquial Irish tongue.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60980-414-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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