An outrageous, scandalously good-humored tribute from a loving son.
The “other woman” surfaces at last and with a vengeance in this tour-de-force sequel to the author's applauded family memoir, 44: Dublin Made Me (1999).
Former director of Dublin’s renowned Abbey Theater, Sheridan can add his name to that list of Irish writers in whose hands the English language plays like a harp: endlessly yet effortlessly lyrical. The soaring tenets of the Catholic faith versus the reality of what flesh is heir to would be grist enough for this kind of talent, but in Sheridan's case, a triangular romance engendered by a paterfamilias with pretensions of practical bigamy enters the mix and endures as the boy becomes a man. Following his father's death, Sheridan revisits his own coming of age in the context of unraveling and coming to terms with the bizarre relationship of his parents and the indefatigable Doris, a wraith of an Englishwoman with a supernatural sense of commitment. Of his iron-willed mother, Sheridan writes: “Ma knew instinctively that to criticize Da was to make herself vulnerable. Instead, she welcomed Doris into the bosom of her family, from where she could keep a close eye on her.” Much of the narrative concerns discovery of the true Da, viewed through the author's eyes and those of the two women he adored, betrayed, and inspired. The enduring tone, a juxtaposition of tenderness and hilarity, is crystallized at Da's wake, where the author finds himself “celebrating with laughter in a place designed for tears. I had never felt such sadness and joy side by side, never thought that loss could be so funny, never realized that laughter could be so spiritual.” Sheridan's ear for priceless Anglo-Irish dialogue provides the engine that pulls each scenario onstage and off, and his dramatic pacing is so expert that more critical readers may wonder how closely he’s hewed to his story’s factual basis. Everyone else will be too busy turning the pages.
An outrageous, scandalously good-humored tribute from a loving son.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03100-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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