A memoir of three generations of women rich in historical detail.
The matrilineal heritage of a successful author.
After her mother's death, Bingham's sister found a blue box in the closet, a box "designed for some mysterious purpose, although it had rested undisturbed for decades." Opening the lid, Bingham (Mending: New and Selected Stories, 2011, etc.) discovered a treasure trove of papers, a diverse collection saved by her great-grandmother Sallie, her grandmother Helena and her mother, Mary. Marriage certificates, letters between two brothers enlisted in the Civil War, manuscripts for short stories and personal essays, and letters between Bingham's mother and father as they danced around the idea of marriage for four long years filled the "soft cornflower blue" box. Using the contents, Bingham melds together a timeline and history of her three maternal ancestors, allowing readers a lovely glimpse into the lifestyles of women raised in the South. Excerpts from her great-grandmother's memoir tell a story of vast change as Sallie experienced the Civil War firsthand. Parties led to suitors, which led to marriage to an Irishman who died an early death from tuberculosis. Helena's short stories weave in and out of her personal narrative of an early marriage and children and the regret she felt over the punishments she doled out to keep her children in line. Bingham's mother's entries round out the trilogy, with clips from love letters between Mary and the author’s father showing their passions and fears as they circled around their love for each other. In the modern world of emails, Skype and a decided lack of handwritten correspondence, Bingham's box of documents traverses time, offering insights into a world of women who knew their own minds long before the word feminist was ever considered.
A memoir of three generations of women rich in historical detail.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-936747-78-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
IN THE NEWS
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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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