Written with skill and humor—and with a vulpine eye that sees much and winks often.
Stretching credulity to the snapping point, Rips searches for (and finds) a mysterious black woman who appears in some drawings executed by the author’s father and discovered only after his death.
Employing images that Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor might well have declined to use in their fiction (too outrageous), Rips (Pasquale’s Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town, 2001) regales us with the antics of his fun-house family out in the Central Plains. Samples: a neighbor named Ronald has sex with a chicken that subsequently appears on the dinner menu. The author’s grandparents operated a brothel. The author as a little boy climbs into bed with his dead nanny. At the circus, Rips and his father see a performer fall to her death. A childhood friend named David has sex with his mother and then years later—mad—removes his own face. An employee in his father’s eyeglass factory affixes an artificial penis to his cowboy boot and is thereby popular with the women. A man, digging graves in the crater of a volcano, survives an eruption, losing only his jaw in the process. A many-days-dead body falls through the ceiling of a coffee shop where the author is sitting. A tornado sucks his grandmother through a basement garbage chute up into the kitchen. It seems currently fashionable in memoir to smudge the ever-vague line between fact and fiction (if you haven’t experienced some bestiality or boozy child-abuse, what chance do you have for publication?), but Rips’s adventures will cause readers to wonder whether there is any difference. Rips continually tries to spread a layer of respectability and even erudition on his narrative cracker, so we’re invited to wonder what Sartre might have thought of all of this, and there are earnest allusions to Ajax, Ionesco, and Herodotus.
Written with skill and humor—and with a vulpine eye that sees much and winks often.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-27352-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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