Despite the familiar story arc, Kaldheim’s voice is fresh and honest, and the redemption and grace feel real.
A drug addict loses everything and then hits the road to find himself.
This engaging memoir borrows its title from Bob Dylan and its road map from Jack Kerouac. Kaldheim, fearing for his life after a Manhattan drug scam went awry, boarded a bus to get as far away as he could afford (Richmond, Virginia), with nothing but regrets to accompany him. He had once been a seminarian and was working his way up the ladder in the publishing industry, and he had been married twice. He’d gotten reckless and careless in his downward spiral, but the one thing he had apparently never squandered was his literary aspiration. So, from the start of his journey, he began taking notes, hoping “that the uncertain road ahead would provide me with the Kerouacian adventures I’d been longing to experience ever since I first read On the Road as a high-school sophomore. Who knows? I thought. There might even be a book in it.” Almost three decades later, this is that book, drawing from some 50 pages of notes Kaldheim had taken on his trip from coast to coast. He mainly hitchhiked and hopped freights, learning the ins and outs of homeless shelters and their free meals, picking up a few bucks here and there at a “Stab Lab” where he sold blood. Early on, a waitress struggling with addiction complimented him as “a good listener,” and what he has assembled here are the stories from others he met within the “brotherhood of the road,” the cautionary tales from those who would gave him a ride or some other necessity. He discovered generosity on a level he had never expected from those who didn’t have much to give, and he also found a wellspring of empathy within himself, “a heart willing to reconnect with the world, if only I had the sense to let it.”
Despite the familiar story arc, Kaldheim’s voice is fresh and honest, and the redemption and grace feel real.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-736-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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