In other hands, this litany of overachievement would have sounded like an exercise in self-congratulation, but Tynan treats...
A memoir by turns sedulous and spirited of the life of Irish tenor Tynan—a man, it turns out, of many parts other than his set of fine pipes.
“Had I not the cross to bear that I did, and I had I not made my own sort of pilgrimage in bearing it, who can say whether I’d ever have been rewarded with all I’ve been given?” That’s as close to boasting as Tynan comes in this account of his first 40 years. Born with focamelia, a bilateral deformity below the knee, young Ronan had to wear corrective braces, which squelched his competitive drive not a whit. He just kept doing the things that gave him pleasure: playing at sports, riding horses, singing with energy while walking in the fields of his family’s farm, pursuing those classes in school that interested him. When he was 20, he had his lower legs amputated; within a year, he was taking medals in international track and field competitions for the disabled. He went to medical school, then took up a general practice in the countryside, all the while finding solace in the joys of his music. His life was a gunning swirl of activity until, at age 32, he decided he must focus on one of his enthusiasms at a time. Music won, though not without further mishaps and detours. Tynan is wonderfully unimpressed by the fame that came to him as one of the Irish Tenors and quick to give credit to all those around him for their support, especially his brick of a father. He doesn’t invite our admiration for his pluck. Working hard at life was simply his style, he maintains; he made a good number of bad moves, same as everyone else.
In other hands, this litany of overachievement would have sounded like an exercise in self-congratulation, but Tynan treats his impressive—actually, astounding—life matter-of-factly.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2291-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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