No mystery and no surprises here, but touching affirmation of the anchoring value of family and home.
A gentle autobiography in which the author's search for self often takes the form of a spiritual quest for goodness.
Fans of Merullo’s novel, Revere Beach Boulevard (1998), should be aware that this is not a continuation of that Italian underworld saga. Instead, it’s a memoir featuring a realistic and affectionate portrait of Revere Beach, a working-class town located five miles outside of Boston with a reputation for toughness and family loyalty similar to that of Brooklyn. The town figures prominently in the chapters of heartfelt, sentimental musings about Merullo’s second-generation Italian-American father, whose life was dictated by pride and discipline and whose gruff exterior masked the grief still felt for a first wife who died in childbirth. And Revere Beach remains an influence throughout the author's life, whether he’s undergoing humbling experiences at the elite Exeter Academy, driving a cab in Boston, studying in the former Soviet Union, serving as an idealistic Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia, or vacationing with his family in Italy. At times, Merullo's ruminations seem a little too self-absorbed, but he comes across as a likable person whose struggles and identity crises are more accessible to the reader than those of most celebrities or historical figures. He goes full circle by visiting his grandmother's girlhood village in Italy, but his desire to travel, perhaps to escape for a little while, remains. “You follow the line of your particular fate,” he ultimately concludes, “a fate built partly on your soul's unique essence, and partly of your class and place and time.” Through precise dialogue and musical narration, Merullo creates a vivid word picture of sights, sounds, and emotions.
No mystery and no surprises here, but touching affirmation of the anchoring value of family and home.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-8070-7244-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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