Although the narrative is occasionally meandering and stolid, the best sections address the difficulties inherent in coming...
A nonfiction-writing professor muses on the random occurrences that led to his parents’ troubled marriage and its subsequent effects on his own trajectory.
Root (Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves, 2013, etc.) ambles along a winding road that begins with the unlikely romance between his mother, Marie, a vivacious young woman focused on marriage and movie stars, and his father, Bob, a quiet, industrious man. A mere two months after the marriage, Bob entered the Marine Corps to fight in World War II, an event that changed the Root family forever. Despite her devout Catholic heritage, Marie, feeling lonely and abandoned, had an affair that resulted in pregnancy; although this infidelity fractured the fledgling marriage, Bob agreed to raise another man’s daughter as his own. Marie favored the girl over her two sons with Bob, and the author grew up feeling alienated from both his parents, spending most of his time reading alone in his room. Over the next several years, his parents divorced, remarried and then divorced again, their tenuous yet stubborn bond remaining constant. After Marie’s death at age 48, the author, now married and studying for a doctorate in English, learned that his mother had engaged in financial deception in addition to adultery. Root’s plainspoken honesty is striking: “I also knew that, even in that moment when I was still in the throes of my own grief and my own sense of loss, I would not forgive my mother for this betrayal.” Further segments address Root’s own divorce and remarriage and the ways that we alternately repeat and reject our parents’ choices.
Although the narrative is occasionally meandering and stolid, the best sections address the difficulties inherent in coming to terms with parental imperfections.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-191-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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