This memoir is most effective when it recounts the horrors of a childhood of fear, sexual abuse, and the illness and death of siblings. Hoffman grew up in the 1950s in Allentown, Penn., where his father worked at a variety of blue-collar jobs. His recollection of his childhood carefully avoids adult retrospective analysis. Thus, when younger brothers Mike and Bob are stricken with muscular dystrophy, it is recounted with a 10-year-old's perspective and grasp of the medical arcana. Both boys were wheelchair-bound, and the family's resources and attention were completely devoted to them. Hoffman's father installed ramps and renovated a downstairs room, rigging ``an ugly cast-iron derrick which transferred [them] from bed to wheelchair to commode.'' Frustrated, and given to drink, the father would rage and weep: ``He was the man I loved and the man I feared,'' writes the author. When his baseball coach, who lured him with his collection of pornographic comic books, repeatedly sodomized him, Hoffman was afraid to tell his father. He recalls gnawing on his arm until it bruised, chasing away the sexual visions conjured by his confused little boy's imagination. In 1990, five years after his mother's death, Hoffman, who had battled drugs and drink, returned home to tell his father about the baseball coach and to explain how much hurt and anger and fear his father's whippings and inattention had caused. Hoffman brandishes a metal spatula similar to the one he'd been spanked with. After his father admits pushing away memories of the two sons who have died, Hoffman waves a picture of himself at the crying man: ``What about this boy? . . . Do you remember him?'' A wonderfully written and heart-wrenchingly sad debut. But the timing and self-serving nature of the confrontation with his father seems merely cruel and has all the logic and cathartic profundity of a 10-minute segment with Oprah or Geraldo.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-100174-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
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