A quietly brooding and intense memoir of family and reckoning with the past.
A British novelist and nonfiction writer’s account of his struggle to come to terms with the death of a younger brother that his family never fully acknowledged.
In the summer of 1978, Beard (Acts of the Assassins, 2015, etc.) and his family went on a holiday to Cornwall. During their time there, his 9-year-old brother Nicholas died in a drowning accident, which the author witnessed. Instead of mourning his death, however, the family sought refuge in “an epic level of denial.” Neither Beard nor his two other brothers attended the funeral. In the weeks and years that followed, Nicholas’ name was expunged from all conversations and mementos, including a clock that bore an engraved list of all family members except Beard’s dead brother. For almost 40 years the author experienced an anguish he could not understand and that only deepened over time. Desperate to make peace with the incident and his role in it, he began a scrupulously detailed, emotionally wrenching exploration of the events surrounding the tragedy. Both he and Nicholas had been playing together on a remote beach when an undertow swept both away from the beach. Rather than try to save his brother, Beard decided to save only himself. Unrelenting guilt drove him to examine family documents, maps, and newspaper clippings and interview family members, the officials at Nicholas’ school, and those involved in the recovery of Nicholas’ body. It also forced him to probe his own past and present feelings toward Nicholas, feelings that ran the gamut from affection to jealous disdain. In a moment of disturbingly profound insight, he realized that the reason he and his family “refused to believe [that Nicholas] needed his home and family [was] because we’d blocked out those needs in ourselves.” Meticulously crafted and searingly honest, Beard’s narrative is at once a story about the long and difficult road to self-forgiveness and a commentary on the wages of British emotional repression.
A quietly brooding and intense memoir of family and reckoning with the past.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44538-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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