Lisicky built, and rebuilt and rebuilt, until it felt good to be in his skin. Famous Builder shows the same urge to grapple...
In an offbeat memoir, Lisicky (Lawnboy, not reviewed) takes dense, obsessed bites from his past and deposits them at the feet of his readers for them to marvel over how he got from there to here.
While growing up in southern New Jersey during the 1960s, in a world of sprawling housing developments, Lisicky wants to be a great builder, like Bill Levitt: “I want those who drive through my communities to be socked in the head with the sheer beauty of all they see.” (Later, when he meets Levitt—or is this just a piece of creative nonfiction?—he says to the mogul, “You gave style to the masses,” and the builder responds: “The masses are asses.”) He’s aware of the stress under Levitt’s veneer, but Lisicky hopes to imbue his work with elegance and understated good taste. He: “All developers do is rip people off. I’m going to be a musician and a composer.” And he does, changing over from construction to liturgical composition, not that the housing developments haven’t left their mark. Through his teens and early 20s, he writes church music—his work is even published—and he discovers a gay sexuality. The sexuality survives, but not the future in music: it had felt right when the church was as much about hope as fear; but now, in its conservative Dark Ages, he asks how he could “ignore charges of colluding with the enemy” should he return to liturgical composition. There are riffs on neighbors, clothing, and college, each snapping the reader to attention after having been lost in one of Lisicky’s long, atmospheric tableaux of family—where the warmth of the reflections and steady pulse of humor suggest Lisicky wasn’t an unhappy boy, nor an unobservant one.
Lisicky built, and rebuilt and rebuilt, until it felt good to be in his skin. Famous Builder shows the same urge to grapple and illuminate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55597-369-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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