Searching, humble and quietly triumphant: Hall has managed to avoid all the easy clichés.
An unusually powerful coming-of-age memoir.
Hall spent her childhood in a remote corner of New Hampshire. She got pregnant during her 16th summer, after sex with a college student she barely knew. It was 1965, and traditional values reigned in small-town New England. Busybodies at the Halls’ church somehow overlooked the fact that her parents were divorced, but they wouldn’t ignore Meredith’s indiscretion. The moment her pregnancy became public, she was kicked out of school. Her mother, deeply ashamed, sent her to live with her father in another town. Dad and stepmom grudgingly took her in, but forbade her to leave the house, or even to come downstairs when they had guests. Hall had a baby boy, gave him up for adoption and enrolled at a far-away boarding school. She slogged through senior year feeling hopelessly alienated from her mirthful classmates. Nonetheless, she dutifully went next to Bennington, only to drop out after a term. Then she began to drift. She moved to Boston, worked odd jobs, bounced from apartment to apartment. She allowed a fight with her stepmother to destroy her relationship with her father. Decades later, living in Maine, Hall began to pull her life together. She matriculated at Bowdoin College, the only “nontraditional student” the school had ever admitted; the short chapter detailing her dogged campaign to gain admission and her first day of classes is one of the most understatedly moving sections here. In 1987, her grown son tracked her down, enabling her to make peace with him and with herself. “I have caused harm, failed in the expectations and obligations of love,” she concludes in characteristically assured prose. “I have loved well. What I do each day is carried within me until I die.”
Searching, humble and quietly triumphant: Hall has managed to avoid all the easy clichés.Pub Date: April 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-8070-7273-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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