In Rozelle’s loving memoir of his late father, a longtime Texas school superintendent, we glimpse a dimly lit picture of an aging man whose character never quite emerges. The author, himself a high-school English teacher in the Houston area, alternates reminiscences of his youth with entries from 1991—92, when his father, Lester, began at age 85 “to slip a bit,” experiencing “short moments of confusion, the hesitation before taking a step.” Poignant scenes show Lester getting lost in the house; forgetting that his wife was not at the store, but instead out of town; and even failing to recognize his son: “I have a son who teaches school,” Lester informs Ron. —Now, tell me again . . . Who are you?” Sad but, in an 85-year- old, not tragic . And the author goes on to draw a shaky portrait of his father’s life in happier years. Flashing back to the1960s, when Lester faced the challenge posed by integration to his school system, Rozelle says little about his father’s actual stance. Ditto Rozelle-the-elder’s stint as a political appointee under President Johnson and even when teaching at a prison. We do learn that the purchase of a fishing cottage (although he did not fish) and a car trip to Florida “were exceptions to an otherwise predictable life.” More vivid is the evocation of Rozelle’s chain-smoking, ailing mother who, stoked with too many medicines, would ultimately shoot herself to death. And a powerful scene of youthful racism has the young Rozelle denying his black playmates to a group of taunting boys: “They ain’t my friends,” he insists. Even a slight memoir has its moments. But the real story seems to lie buried somewhere below the surface of the author’s recollections of good times with his mother and under Rozelle’s reflections on his changing East Texas neighborhood.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-17711-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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