A prolific Chicagoan journalist climbs his family tree.
Having previously written about the Windy City’s two most notorious serial killers and its 19th-century police-corruption scandal, Lindberg (The Gambler King of Clark Street, 2009, etc.) turns inward with a bittersweet labor of love he asserts was many years in the making. The Swedish American author was born in Chicago in the 1960s, “at the height of the McCarthy-era hysteria,” and was raised by his stern, “paradoxical” father Oscar, who followed (and instilled in his son) extremist socialist principles. Lindberg draws readers into his family lineage with an engaging combination of historical specifics and anecdotal memories springing from the mass exodus of Swedes from their native land. Many, including his own parents and grandparents, fled an impoverished life in rural Sweden for the shores of America in search of peace and prosperity. But this is very much Oscar’s story. As Lindberg methodically traces the genesis of his Swedish family, the memoir’s focus remains on his father, who “slipped past” Canadian customs officials in 1924 to settle in Chicago’s North Side “Swedetown,” a favored immigrant destination. Through letters and the author’s remarkably sturdy memory, he illustrates the despair of his father’s life: the crushing death of his mother, the turmoil of four rocky marriages and the halfhearted attempts to be a good father to his children while battling alcoholism. Yet the cultivation of Oscar’s hardworking livelihood as a postwar master homebuilder reveals a redeeming inner strength and nobility. Woven throughout Lindberg’s exhaustive narration are palpable threads of sadness and anger aimed at a father who lacked compassion and affection, stunting the development of a son whose childhood needs went unmet. Only in the final pages, when the author writes of attending an emotionally healing class reunion, is a moving moment of catharsis achieved. Deep, introspective and somber, this is by far Lindberg’s most personal book to date.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4684-5
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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