A good-natured tale about a lost world that lies over the Brooklyn Bridge.
A candid, personal look at the geography of memory.
In this warmhearted memoir of a retiree’s tour of his old haunts, Junker tries to do for 1950s Brooklyn what James Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses: rebuild a city, from memory. For readers looking for more accessible, albeit less remarkable, prose than Joyce’s, Junker’s tale is quite appealing, as he reconstructs Brooklyn in a specific place and time. The author spends a single winter day in Brooklyn walking the streets that defined his childhood, visiting the homes, churches and baseball fields where much of his story played out. Though not entirely idyllic–for example, the author’s German father suffers the indignities of discrimination after the war and dies relatively young–on the whole, the story will engage readers with animated recollections of a boisterous Italian neighborhood. Constructing the narrative around specific places like Coney Island, Kings Highway and Prospect Park, the author firmly ties each to the people in his life, remembering his rabble-rousing friends and ribald uncles with equal parts warmth and reserve. Junker reflects Brooklyn through the prism of his childhood, but he makes the archeology of the place vibrant and meaningful, even for readers who have never set foot in the New York borough. It’s the details that make it delicious, from recollections of the Brooklyn Dodgers that tap the country’s collective love of the underdog, to the sing-song cacophony of immigrant voices living the American dream. The author fittingly thanks Pete Hamill for inspiration–Junker infuses his childhood stomping grounds with the same affection with which Hamill writes about Manhattan.
A good-natured tale about a lost world that lies over the Brooklyn Bridge.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-36846-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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