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
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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