A memoir to savor for its many riches and, most of all, its zest.
Humorous and insightful chronicle of a long life filled with interesting friends and experiences, shared for nearly six decades with an exceptional man.
Still writing at 87 (the eponymous column for her local New Hampshire paper), Campion is one of those rare people who can recall both joyously and wisely a full existence, dwelling mostly in sunny uplands rather than the inevitable dark valleys. She is an accomplished raconteur; her stories of dinners with Craig Claiborne; a 1992 interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton (a fellow Wellesley graduate); and a conversation with E.B. White are exemplary, entertaining as well as informative. But these delightful anecdotes are only part of a book as notable for its personal testament as for its portrait of the early 20th century. In an address to her class of 1938 reunion—now a classic after its 1993 publication in The Boston Globe—Campion listed all the changes her generation had experienced. “We were before television, penicillin, nylon, Xerox,” she noted. “Wellesley ‘girls’ were forbidden to wear pants and Harvard ‘boys’ thought only Hillbillies wore blue jeans . . . we had real fountain pens with real bottles of ink . . . and when Ray Noble slowly sang ‘The Very Thought of You’ we melted.” Born in 1917 in Hawaii, where her military father was stationed, she numbered among her experiences as an army brat a voyage to Manila on the same boat as the honeymooning General MacArthur and a stint in Panama. In her last year at Wellesley, she met husband-to-be Tom Campion, a Harvard senior who taught her “that laughter is life’s best solvent.” This lesson helped as Tom changed jobs four times, they raised five children (one of whom had a breakdown in college), and she wrote seven books, including one that became the movie The Long Gray Line.
A memoir to savor for its many riches and, most of all, its zest.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2004
ISBN: 1-58465-407-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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