A slight work with memorable portraits of a fragmented family.
A young woman tries to reconcile her memories of her father’s murder with the recollections of others.
Howard—dance critic and book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle—was ten in 1986, when her father was stabbed to death. Seventeen years later, she began her quest to make sense of things, sort out what happened and put to rest her suspicions and fears. Her depiction of life with her mother, her addicted and abusive stepfather, Howdy, and her half-brother Emmet is vivid, as are those early years spent with her father and beloved and loving first stepmother, Nanette. When her cocaine-sniffing father moves on to his next wife, the sexy young Sherrie, visiting arrangements are such that she spends considerable time with them and with her new young stepbrother Bobby. She adores her father but fears and dislikes Sherrie and must get along with Bobby. Blue-collar life in California’s Central Valley is rich in detail: shabby tract homes, trucks, fights, language, clothes, pop music—all ring true, whether actually from memory or reconstructions. Indeed, the question of memory and its reliability is one Howard has to face in her search. Accounts of her father’s murder differ: her own memories of the night of the murder, on the one hand, differ from what she learns from the police, which differ from the recollections of her stepmother and stepbrother. She seeks out and interviews family members she hasn’t been in touch with for years, questions detectives who worked on the case and tracks down old newspaper articles. Yet this is not a detective story, and Howard doesn’t solve the crime. Although she hates the overused word “closure,” that’s what in fact she is searching for, and it’s what she finds. By the end, her adoration of her father and her hatred and suspicion of her stepmother have been tempered, and her need to find someone to blame, vanquished.
A slight work with memorable portraits of a fragmented family.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-94862-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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