Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight.
Intensely personal essays explore autobiography as a means of creative self-examination.
Foster (All the Lost Girls, 2000) organizes these pieces, most of which have previously been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, into three sections: “Inside the Girls’ Room,” “Inside the Writing Room,” and “Inside My Skin.” Or so the table of contents indicates. The actual arrangement bears little resemblance to the proposed structure, which seems to have been an attempt to form a cohesive whole out of essays written at different times in the author’s life. No matter. Their unity of theme persists regardless of their placement here. The author looks closely at what it means to be a southerner, to be white, to be middle-class, and to be a woman in the various roles that that implies. She examines how her life has been shaped by her genteel upbringing in a small southern town where girls were expected to be charming. Ambition, she admits, “swam through my bloodstream like a virus,” and she puzzled over how to pursue it without relinquishing feminine charm. After college and a failed marriage, she returned to her parents’ home in Alabama in her 20s, conflicted and confused. Fleeing the South, where she didn’t fit in, Foster moved to Los Angeles, attempted for a while to write fiction, and then moved to Iowa, where she discovered that writing autobiography was her métier, a way to tell her own story and probe her own identity. One of her most effective pieces, “Skin,” tells of trying to teach memoir writing to a class of 20 people in a storefront library in Tuskegee, a small town in Alabama’s Black Belt. Foster, who arrived believing that autobiographical writing would somehow magically bring people closer to themselves as well as to each other, feels anxious, awkward, and terribly conscious of her whiteness. By the second day the class has shrunk to six, and the writing lesson becomes a lesson in racism.
Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2688-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
