Originally published in 1911 as an anonymous autobiography, this novel by radical journalist Vorse (18741937) paints a convincing portrait of the pleasures, regrets, and grievances of a middle-class grandmother who fights daily to be her own person. Vorse was 37 when she penned the book ``in her mother's voice,'' creating a long-widowed narrator who has passed that ``golden moment'' in life when her children regarded her as their comrade and now finds herself treated much like a young child. She's subject to the gentle, caring tyrannies of her nearest and dearest, who take for granted their right to determine which activities are good for her (going for unwanted walks and for even more unwanted rides in the newfangled ``nasty, smelly, jouncing, child-grazing, dog-smashing, chicken-routing'' automobile) and which activities aren't good for her (light dusting or cleaning out the attic—although she would like to do both). We sense the narrator's shrewdness when, after a young visitor complains that ``there are no more real grandmothers,'' she exposes the selfishness underlying this ideal. And we appreciate her spirit when she says, ``I shall keep my family alert over my misdeeds until my end.'' Vorse, however, resists idealizing this grandmother—in fact, a discussion of the narrator's own mother depicts a woman who did a better job than she herself did of keeping her independence and managing her later years. Still, Vorse's narrator is wise enough to prompt Doris Grumbach, in the book's afterword, to hope that middle-aged readers can learn from the ``autobiography'' what it's like to be elderly and that the elderly can find company in it. A meandering yet purposeful work that reads, for good and bad, like the long monologue of an elderly, articulate relative. Untarnished by the years on its major points.
Pub Date: April 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-916366-79-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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