A relentlessly gritty but good-humored tale of hope and survival.
Memoir of a childhood waylaid by a miscreant alcoholic father, notable for the enduring affection that comes to the surface.
Money is so tight for the author’s divorced mother in Albany, New York, that she sends 11-year-old Michael off to live with his estranged father, a sometime bellhop and jack of all menial hotel trades. She can barely support Michael’s two younger sisters on a waitress’s pay, and besides, received wisdom holds in the spring of 1959, “Boys should be with their father, and girls should be with their mother.” Michael suspects he is unloved by either parent, but Dad’s scheme to ditch Albany and find a better life for the two of them in California quickly awakens what will grow into a fierce wanderlust. Keith (Communications/Boston Coll.) chronicles their peregrinations with graphic recall and a gift for detail. After the bus money runs out, they face the hitchhiker’s ultimate reality: you take what you get. Often penniless, sometimes on a shoestring that permits, for instance, a “Christmas dinner” consisting of calves liver and canned yams, they stumble westward, city by faceless city. In each venue, the elder Keith makes a show of providing for his son, picking up odd jobs (often via a newly acquired “friend” from a bar binge) but usually screwing up to the point where they go on the grift, convincing some kindly soul that a “letter with money from out of town” is due any day if they can just get a room and a few groceries. Left on his own while Dad is either working or sleeping one off, Michael gets buffeted by life at its seamiest—he’s once even charged as an accomplice to an armed robbery—while absorbing street smarts and coming dangerously close to loving the life he hates.
A relentlessly gritty but good-humored tale of hope and survival.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-364-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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