One grumpy old man and his grandson—rated N for nostalgic and, finally, T for tragic. To readers who don't share Apple's (The Propheteers, 1987) affection, his grandfather Rocky (nÇ Yerachmiel) might best be described by his own favorite epithet: ``son of a beetch.'' From his childhood in Grand Rapids, Mich., through his graduate school days in Ann Arbor, to his years as a husband, father, and college professor in Houston, Apple's beloved ``roommate'' was his ornery grandfather. Rocky has his touching, and humorous, points: The lifelong baker continues his art even after passing 100 years of age; an Orthodox Jew, he caringly ushers a young seeker into Judaism; he accompanies Max and his girlfriend, Debby, on a comical mission to recover Debby's shanghaied dog. But Rocky is also a master of emotional blackmail; confronted with Debby's moving into the Ann Arbor apartment, he says, ``If I wanted to live in a whorehouse, I could have stayed in Grand Rapids.'' Much of Apple's narrative is an ongoing cycle of battles and reconciliation, with Rocky locking himself in his bedroom or the basement (for instance, refusing to attend Max and Debby's wedding) and eventually relenting. His wedding cake comes ten years after the fact—too late not only for the event, but too late for Debby to enjoy at all, for by then her mind, and body, have been touched by multiple sclerosis. The final third of Apple's account relates the devastating effects of her illness on daughter Jessica and son Sam. Jessica buries herself in baseball statistics, and both shun their friends. (``I hate it when people ask me about Mom,'' Jessica says. ``I just tell them she fell off the Empire State Building.'') Apple himself tries to juggle devotion to his hospitalized wife with the complex needs of the children. In the end, it is Apple's affecting writing about his deepest loss that carries this book. Disney will be releasing it as a movie (starring Peter Falk as Rocky).
Pub Date: June 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-446-51826-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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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