A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we...
Singer’s first book is a memoir of two obsessions: with California and with finding a place for herself.
The story begins with the dissolution of the author’s family and her move, at 16, with younger siblings, mother, and stepfather, from Montreal to California, a place with which she has been absorbed for years. “My affair with California begins many years before we meet,” writes the author, recalling an early library encounter with a book about the Golden State. “A state?” she wondered. “Like New York, where we drive once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in our Jeep’s trunk on the way back, away from the customs officials so we don’t have to pay extra taxes?” Singer’s glee at being in California was complicated by a custody battle involving one of her brothers. “Are you sexually active?” That was the question the opposing counsel asked her just before she took the stand on her mother’s behalf. It was a treacherous moment, but while Singer draws her structure from it—the book is built, more or less, as a series of interrogations and responses—she is interested in treachery of a more personal sort. The author is at her best when she uses narrative to examine disconnection, as with the Taylors, a family for whom she worked yet never quite belonged. “Two of my own families,” she writes, “have already exploded. Nuclear family has not proved successful, but still I am drawn to it.” This search for place took Singer north, where she researched a serial killer in Yosemite, though she was really looking for herself. As the book progresses, it becomes less fragmentary. On one hand, that’s inevitable given the difficulty of stitching together a book of fragments. On the other, it’s disappointing given the strength of her fractured approach.
A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9988257-1-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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