Hoffman writes of his father that “he was more comfortable with his many contradictions than I am with mine,” in a book in...
A professor’s literary-minded meditations on fatherhood.
As a writer of poems, stories and a previous memoir (Half the House, 1996), and as someone who has “been teaching writers for nearly twenty years, focused especially on the memoir and the personal essay,” Emerson College senior writer in residence Hoffman knows how to recognize good material and how to frame and organize it, even as he dilutes the immediacy of emotion here with more abstract musings on pornography, feminism, and issues of race and class. In other words, his memoir is more powerful when it is showing us (his direct experience) rather than telling us (his ideas). This begins with the author and his brother talking with their father about his impending death, and it ends with the father’s funeral. “Sometimes I think I’ve had two fathers: the one who made me, and the one I’ve made of him,” he muses. This book is about both, as well as how the author’s own fatherhood has affected his feelings toward his father: “Being a new father, I was having a hard time with my dad—with him, with my memory of him, and with my idea of him.” The father and his family were blue-collar, not particularly reflective, and matter-of-fact in their racism. The author was sexually molested as a boy by his coach (whom his previous memoir helped send to prison), became an alcoholic, realized in recovery that his son had the same problem, and had to come to terms with his unwed daughter’s pregnancy, by a Jamaican man with a criminal history and an increasingly tangled relationship with both the author and his daughter. “I had feelings too complicated to fully understand,” writes the author of his impending grandfatherhood and the less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding it.
Hoffman writes of his father that “he was more comfortable with his many contradictions than I am with mine,” in a book in which readers are also likely to find more contradictions than comfort.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4471-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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