Plaintive but philosophically provocative.
An elegiac remembrance of an Armenian’s flight from war and the cruel aftermath of a culture ravaged.
This is a family affair narrated by Raphael Gianighian and his son Vartan, who edited the work. In 1915, Raphael was forced to flee his native district, Khodorchur, after the Turks attempted to exterminate the Christian Armenians. Raphael captures his travails in about 100 pages, the first third of this remembrance. His survival against grim odds was astonishing and was partly due to his grandfather’s bravery and guile and partly due to the assistance provided by American relief organizations that mobilized to help displaced Armenians. Raphael’s account is harrowing, written in a simple but powerful hand: “We see headless, decomposing bodies floating on the Tohma River. The guards stop us in front of a big inn. We wait for our fellow countrymen to arrive. The site is crowded. The river flows below the inn, and in the front space, blood stains the tables and benches and walnut trunks. Old men with long beards smoke narghilé and drink coffee. The butchers have cut off the Armenians’ heads, stuck them on the tree trunks, and thrown the corpses into the river.” Written in the third person, the second third of the book is a pastiche of perspectives, including writings from Raphael and some of his fellow travelers, all woven together by Vartan. In this section, Raphael, after having settled in Italy, returns to Khodorchur to bear witness to the sad remnants of the village he once called home. Khodorchur is a testament not only to a victimized people, but to a culture all but vanished from the Earth. The third section of the book, written in the first person by Vartan, recounts his own emotionally tumultuous visit to Khodorchur in an attempt to learn more about his father, his family, and the ethnic heritage denied him. His own experience mirrors his father’s return from exile, marked by profound sorrow and personal transformation. This is an affecting tale, told by both father and son, as historically edifying as it is excruciating.
Plaintive but philosophically provocative.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500692551
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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