Blistering scrapbook pages from a melancholy childhood.
Simple yet affecting follow-up to MacDonald’s raw debut memoir, All Souls (1999).
The previous book detailed in broad brushstrokes a difficult life growing up in the Old Colony housing project of prideful, Irish-Catholic South Boston. The author, now nearing 40, digs deeper this time, providing a more introspective, personal tour (spliced with pages of song lyrics) of his loss of innocence as one of nine children living in a drug-and organized-crime-ridden environment, barely supervised by his wise, accordion-playing Ma. His neighborhood provided a generally pleasant though restrictive enclave of family and friends, but MacDonald craved “venturing alone beyond Southie’s borders.” The early-’80s punk-rock scene afforded him all that and more. Though initially pensive, teenager MacDonald, inspired by Patti Smith, was soon shoplifting his first Sex Pistols album, attending school with spiky pink hair and a dog collar and covering his bedroom windows with black cloth. This behavior led to late nights sneaking into bars with new friends, finding himself onstage at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert, then skipping school altogether. New York City and dance clubs like Danceteria and the Mudd Club provided a much-needed respite from the increasingly treacherous streets of Southie, but nothing could prepare MacDonald for the systematic deterioration of his siblings: Schizophrenic Davey killed himself, Kathy almost succumbed to a drug overdose, Frankie and Kevin met violent ends. Eventually, situational stresses began to weigh heavily on MacDonald’s psyche, and he turned to alcohol and drugs “to erase, to forget about everything”—except the funeral for the father he barely knew. After therapy, he moved onward to several carefree, if penniless, weeks in Europe, but an enlightening visit to Ireland with his mother was what really turned him around. Though the author, now a social activist, emerged physically unscathed from his upbringing, the emotional scars he bears are undeniable.
Blistering scrapbook pages from a melancholy childhood.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-47025-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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