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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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