Needs more rigorous identification of what is fact, what is fancy.
Highly impressionistic memoir by an African-American woman who grew up in Colorado, where she experienced poverty, racism and the tough love of her irascible but devoted aunt.
Williams’s narrative strategies invite considerable skepticism. Though her father, an able carpenter and builder, ran off when she was two, she remembers just how he mixed concrete, how deftly he swung a hammer. She relates many incidents from her youth in pages of verbatim dialogue. Readers may well wonder how much here is remembered, how much imagined. The prose, by contrast, is decidedly unimaginative: Style and vocabulary are unremarkable, the diction often trite (“two shakes of a lamb’s tail”), and the similes strained (one woman’s anomalous beauty reminds the author of “a cantaloupe vine growing in a compost heap”). The author begins with a visit to see Aunt Daisy, now in her 90s, who at 21 married 79-year-old Civil War veteran Robert Ball Anderson. Williams then supplies more family history before launching into her personal story. After her mother died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning (an event whose aftermath is related in “remembered” dialogue), four-year-old Rita went to live near Steamboat Springs with Daisy. Her aunt taught the author about the outdoors, hard work, fishing, slaughtering lambs, raising goslings, poverty, dignity and discipline (she neither spared the rod nor spoiled the child). Rita was bright and curious; she loved reading and the arts and got to take some courses at a local arts camp where Daisy cleaned. As Williams tells it, she bounced around from school to school, questioned religion, endured racism overt and covert and eventually headed off to college. Along the way there is attempted suicide and rape, the latter occurring right after the author hears Dylan sing “The Times They Are A’Changin’.”
Needs more rigorous identification of what is fact, what is fancy.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101154-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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
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