In this, her first prose work, poet Peacock shares a profoundly intimate tale of coming to terms with her creative identity and her decision, vital to that identity, to remain without children. As a poet, Peacock has that rare ability to examine things through words, and here, her life is the subject, a paradise she has uncovered piece by piece, to reveal the garden she has so lovingly cultivated from the bare ground of a troubled childhood. From her earliest memory of sitting beneath a kitchen table, hearing her parents— pain before the enormity of marriage and parenthood, the fact of being an unwanted child discovering language, to the moment in time when she can fully feel through words what it means to be alive and free of that early burden, Peacock draws us into the journey of becoming a woman-poet who has chosen childlessness as an important part of her identity. “The emptiness that is required for all creativity” was an important discovery for Peacock, yet it troubled her throughout her life, sexually, emotionally, and finally creatively. This exhilarating memoir stumbles in real time upon the observation that a sonnet is “the size of a plump made bed, and a blank page is a room . . . where consciousness sleeps.” The sensuality of her language is a measure of the directness with which she has lived the issues of her womanhood. She stares down the blurry memories of her hard-drinking father, her burdened and dependent mother, and her self- destructive sister and finds the air she needs to thrive in those friends who stood by her, and those men who encouraged and loved her, and saw her poetry as their true offspring. Once free of inhibition, Peacock’s adulthood grows out of childhood the way extraordinary fruits sometimes grow out of a waterless earth: stronger, more resilient, and bearing the kaleidoscope fruit of creativity.
Pub Date: May 4, 1998
ISBN: 1-57322-097-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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