A fascinating, gracefully written glimpse into the complexities of family life, full of secrets, hidden wounds, and survival...
All is not as it seems. That’s a good rule in life—and especially in family histories, the subject of this elegant memoir.
The daughter of New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly and Maus creator Art Spiegelman grew up surrounded by smart people and bright talk, always with the knowledge that mom was a touch eccentric. Her account opens with an episode involving a lightning storm over a choppy ocean, a risk taken seriously, Mouly believed, “by timid women who washed their vegetables”—and that her relatives across the water in France might be a touch dottier still. That wasn’t the half of it. As Spiegelman recounts, it took a residence abroad in Paris and frequent exposure to her grandparents to understand just why it was that her mother might have wanted to put an ocean between them. Of her plastic-surgeon grandfather, her mother protested, “you don’t understand. He’s just used to touching women.” There’s more to it than all that, providing some of the book’s darker moments, which are alleviated by grand-mère’s antics, even if that sturdy elder demanded that she be called Josée, as if to magically ward off the suspicion that the decades had passed. “My grandmother was beautiful long after she was beautiful,” Spiegelman writes, getting it just right. “She carried herself and dressed herself in a way that left no question.” The oddness of mother runs to grandmother and on into the past, as Spiegelman explores decades of memory with knowing nods: “Mina slapped Josée often. Which is not to say she was an abused child, she added quickly.” In the end, readers may be left with a sense of gratitude that his or her family is comparatively normal, which is not to say that these folks are terrible—odd, sure, but muddling through, with a sometimes-rueful but empathetic descendant recalling episodes they might well want to forget.
A fascinating, gracefully written glimpse into the complexities of family life, full of secrets, hidden wounds, and survival tips.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-192-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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