A rangy but underwhelming artist memoir.
Polson tells of his struggles to balance an artist’s life with family demands in this debut remembrance.
Starting in 1957, when the Wyoming-born author was 9, he started having a yearly vision: “Suddenly the universe around me was filled with light. Orbs were floating in the void. One sphere had a shape emerging within it. The shape became a human figure, and my fear turned to calmness, peace, and enlightenment.” The vision’s meaning was unclear to him, but it augured the restlessness that would characterize his adult life. After a first, early marriage in Wyoming fell apart, Polson moved west to pursue a career as a painter. He held down odd jobs in various cities, working as a substitute teacher in Las Vegas, an inflatable-sculpture maker in San Diego, an art framer in Seattle. All the while, he painted, sculpted, and sought his voice as an artist. He even managed to take an impressive tour of Europe, visiting the great museums of the continent for inspiration. Throughout his life, however, the fluctuations of romantic relationships and his obligations to his resulting children unsettled his already-unsteady life as an aspiring visual artist. It is only now, after decades of work and thousands of pieces, that Polson says that he can look back and appraise his decisions. In this memoir, the author writes in simple prose with straightforward descriptions and observations: “Life was strange in Southern California. People didn’t become attached to one another like they did in Wyoming.” Readers may wish that the memoir contained a bit more self-investigation, though, as some lines keep its narrator from being truly sympathetic, such as when he calls his act of writing a memoir a “noble” one. The author does succeed in documenting the often difficult life of people who pursue the arts as a career. However, there’s little in this book that readers can’t find in numerous other memoirs, penned by other vagabonds of Polson’s generation.
A rangy but underwhelming artist memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3092-5
Page Count: 357
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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