Sweet as pie.
The Fab Four become the common ground a father and young son need to light a fire under their relationship in this winning memoir from journalist/novelist Smith (A Good Family, 1996, etc.).
Dad was overworked and underattentive to his seven-year-old: “As Sam got older, I seemed to be mummifying before his eyes . . . my posture defensive, my voice thinner and higher than usual.” One day when Sam was mooning around the house, Peter figured it was time for a new obsession and, not unaware of the inroads popular music was making into the boy’s life, thought the Beatles might make a suitable fixation. And how: from the first taste of Abbey Road, Sam was a goner. And why not? Peter rightly asks. “Nearly a half-century has defanged the group, reducing its innovations and iconoclasms to something warmer and fuzzier,” though the author found upon extensive re-listening that the lads still had their edge of wit and exoticism, still possessed their ability to be smart-assed without being boors. The band’s “boyhood friendships and grownup squabbles, its rivalries, love affairs, submarines, octopuses, silver hammers, newspaper taxis, piggies, raccoons, meter maids” were also pluses. Having grown up with the Beatles, Peter loved them every bit as much as Sam, and it is a small pleasure to watch as the two Smiths discover a vehicle of mutual transit to places they surely never expected to visit just weeks earlier: the politics of Vietnam, death and grief, privacy, Eastern religion, drugs. This occasionally seems overedited, with the author smoothing what had to have been some pregnant moments, but that small fault pales before the joy he conveys at the heaven-sent gift of togetherness he and Sam got from a pop group. You’ve got to love the Beatles, if only for having this kind of impact on the common man and boy, and Smith, whose motives in letting four other men loose in his son’s heart were pure.
Sweet as pie.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-25145-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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