Captivating memoir of life and customs in Boonville, Missouri, during the 1940's-50's. Davis (English/Univ. of Oklahoma) re-creates his Catholic youth with thoughtful originality, as if sketching his past on a grid and then coloring in the squares with shades called ``Protestants and Catholics,'' ``Town and Country,'' ``Food and Drink,'' and so on. He begins with a lively family history of the Davises, clearly a line of eccentrics just short of being crackpots, then dips into the physical layout and history of Boonville, its state during WW II, and the first hints of his several awakenings. The writing flags after this opening, however, caught in abstracted social recollection that focuses in part on racial awareness between blacks and whites. Midway through, though, Davis sinks his fingers into the fertile loam of childhood and youth, with rich descriptions of milking chores, gardening, his work-ridden father's resistance to the boy's studies, and the kinds of food and drink the family enjoyed. The narrative blooms with the author's telling of the differences between knowledgeable country boys and naive town boys; of the first inklings of sexual development in school, with the girls maturing faster than the boys; of his reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars series for information about sex (its red-skinned Martian heroine lays eggs for John Carter to impregnate); of neighborhood games from childhood through the team sports of adolescence; and of trash art, his disappointment in a young woman's suicide note modeled on ``lumpen-realistic true confession and modern romance magazines,'' and the magic of getting to Kansas City. Leisurely dig through leaf-meal on a southern life-path, best when the compost ripens.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8203-1392-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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
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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