A mixed bag, redeemed by the author’s portrait of his father, rendered with rawboned honesty and heartache.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Bragg returns to the rural Alabama home turf of Ava’s Man (2001) and All Over But the Shoutin’ (1997) with a double narrative that braids two emotional journeys.
A recent marriage and the baggage that came with it—a ten-year-old stepson who still carried around his “blanky”—led the author to revisit the story of his father Charlie, whom he had previously depicted as an improvident, violent drunk who blighted the lives of Bragg’s mother and two brothers. Here, extensive interviews with friends and relatives of the “Prince of Frogtown” (the neighborhood where Charlie and his brothers lived and battled in the streets) have produced a more dynamic, if not necessarily nobler portrait. In youth, Charlie drag-raced, swept away his best friend’s girl and even stole the keys to the county jail. That was before combat in the Korean War, repeated run-ins with the local sheriff, an increasing taste for alcohol and a TB diagnosis. With considerable discernment, the author traces how his family was formed by a blue-collar town and its hardscrabble past, marked by Indian wars and the Civil War. His native area’s cadences, smooth and rich as bourbon, seep naturally into Bragg’s prose: Paternal grandfather Bob “never met a man he wouldn’t fight at least twice, if insulted, and he intended to slap all the pretty off Handsome Bill Lively’s face.” Alternating chapters on his unnamed stepson, by contrast, resound more with the annoyance Bragg feels at the start than the love he professes at the end, at which point the author sounds uncomfortably self-congratulatory about the maturation of his stepson, now “the man I rushed him to be.”
A mixed bag, redeemed by the author’s portrait of his father, rendered with rawboned honesty and heartache.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4040-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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