Samway, who edited Signposts in a Strange Land, Percy's posthumously published essays, successfully triangulates the major forces unifying Percy's life (191690): a complex mix of Catholic faith, existential angst, and scientific method. Percy spent his childhood in Greenville, Miss., raised by his uncle, the poet Will Percy, after the suicide of both parents. He began writing early, as a gossip columnist for his high school newspaper, but later turned to medicine, seeking a scientific discipline to bring order to his chaotic life. Stricken with tuberculosis while serving a residency at New York's Bellevue hospital, Percy spent several years recovering in a sanitarium. There he began reading philosophy and identified the central irony in his life: Science, despite unraveling the workings of the human body and the universe, ultimately knows nothing about the mystery of human existence, ``what it is like to be a man living in the world who must die.'' To explore that mystery Percy turned to fiction, which he considered a means of applying the scientific method to the study of the self. Though best known for novels of alienation, including his 1962 National Book Awardwinning The Moviegoer, Percy felt his essays on semiotics (the study of ``why people talk and animals don't,'' as he joked to longtime friend Shelby Foote) were his most important work. Despite considerable efforts to explain them, Percy's difficult language theories here remain obtuse. Samway, a Jesuit and close friend of Percy's, is more adept at illuminating the writer's midlife conversion to Catholicism, insightfully tracing the influence of this sustaining religious faith on his fiction—a connection Percy felt too few readers made. He believed The Moviegoer was misunderstood as ``a novel of despair, rather than a novel about despair but with hope.'' Such crucial distinctions make this an essential critical companion to Percy's work, though the respectful tone mutes Percy's darker side—the malevolent irony and wicked satire so integral to his novels. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18735-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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