A quietly profound memoir “of a family and how it got that way.”
An award-winning writer tells the story of his family by exploring the lives of three remarkable female relatives through three generations.
Shelton (Emeritus, English/Univ. of Arizona; Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer, 2007, etc.) reflects on a childhood and adolescence spent “hover[ing] precariously between the middle and lower classes.” Rather than offer a chronology of events in his family life, the author interweaves his life reflections with stories about his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, who all kept the journals Shelton uses to construct his larger narrative. He begins with his great-grandmother Josephine. A Midwestern beauty who married a jack-of-all-trades husband with a penchant for writing poetry, Josie was a hardscrabble Kansas homesteader in the late 1800s. “For Josie,” writes Shelton, “there is no yellow brick road and no wizard,” only grueling labor and an early death. Her daughter, Charlotte, settled in Idaho, raised four children, and survived two difficult marriages, a scandalous affair, and several live-in lovers before marrying a man nearly a decade her junior. This free-spirited woman offended Shelton’s mother, Hazel, who wanted “genteel respectability above all else.” Yet Hazel’s own marriage to the charming, alcoholic Red was far from a middle-class fairy tale. Despite having been raised in a rich farming community where many of his relatives had been wealthy landowners, Red was a poor man who made his living as a bootlegger during the Depression and then as a house painter later on. Emotionally distant from Shelton, Red routinely had affairs with other women, which Hazel tried to avenge by shooting up a bar Red frequented with his girlfriends. Only when Shelton, who became the first in his family to go to college, became Red’s caretaker during his final illness did the rifts in their own relationship begin to heal. In this richly textured book, the author creates a memorable family portrait and reveals the way patterns of living within families shape expectations and reality.
A quietly profound memoir “of a family and how it got that way.”Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8165-3400-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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