As Blew (All But the Waltz, 1991) watches her long-idolized aunt Imogene slide into dementia, she wisely analyzes past and present to create a stronger self and a more honest future. Imogene was born of the stark and dusty Montana plains at a time when women were expected to marry and raise children. Instead, she became a schoolteacher and moved away from her family, as far west as possible, to the end of Washington's Olympic peninsula, to live an independent and solitary life. Things change when Imogene, age 79, wakes up one morning and doesn't remember how to make oatmeal; subsequently she sells her house and moves to Lewiston, Idaho, to be near her niece. At the same time, Blew's daughter from her first marriage, whom she hasn't seen in several years, comes for a visit and announces that she's divorcing her husband and moving to Lewiston to attend veterinary school. If Blew had trouble juggling her seven-year-old daughter Rachel from her second (failed) marriage and teaching grad school and writing, what a shock to find that her aunt, who's always provided a haven in times of distress, now needs care, and her older daughter, who feels so foreign to her (``Depression after my divorce erased my young womanhood...until I feel almost certain that Rachel is the only child I ever had''), might become a friend. While Blew struggles with practical choices, like residential care, she also struggles with spiritual ones, recognizing that she knows nothing of the real Imogene except what she'd needed to see and so has no idea where her aunt goes when she falls ``through the hole in her mind.'' Blew turns to Imogene's journals for clues to break down her family's unstated code—``never speak aloud of what you feel deeply''—and is surprised to find her own voice. Sagebrush and sage.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84857-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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