Jean Rio’s is an interesting life, but Denton’s fourth outing disappoints.
Award-winning author Denton (American Massacre, 2003, etc.), who’s written widely on the American West, tells the story of her great-great-grandmother, a Mormon pioneer.
A well-heeled Victorian Englishwoman, Jean Rio Griffiths found herself dissatisfied with the staid ways of the Church of England. When in 1848 Jean Rio and her husband met Mormon missionary John Taylor, they were captivated by his message, and in 1849 they were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Just months later, Jean Rio’s husband died, and in 1851 the widow took her seven children to America to join the Mormons in Utah. Jean Rio was ultimately disappointed by the church—she loathed polygamy, she was horrified by the 1857 massacre, when Mormons slaughtered a train-full of “Gentile” pioneers, and she couldn’t tolerate the Mormons’ acceptance of widespread poverty. Eventually, she left and moved to California. The strength of Denton’s biography lies in her eye for detail: for example, in the description of Jean Rio’s grand piano, the first to make it by wagon to the intermountain West, or the mention of the ox that died because he ingested Indian war paint. The book is filled with riveting vignettes, like the stories of Jean Rio’s mother’s escape as a baby from Revolutionary France to Scotland and of Jean Rio’s daughter-in-law’s migration from Denmark to Utah. Denton, however, fails to establish herself as an entirely trustworthy narrator. Granted, impartial writing about Mormonism is rare. But while the tale here isn’t wildly sensationalistic, neither is it entirely evenhanded. Denton speaks of Jean Rio’s being “seduced” by the story the missionaries told. She leans heavily on Fawn Brodie’s biased biography of Joseph Smith but doesn’t cite standard academic histories like Jan Shipps’s Mormonism. The ending—celebrating the “tolerance” and “hope for a community of faith irrespective of creed” that, in Denton’s view, Jean Rio espoused by the end of her life—is anodyne.
Jean Rio’s is an interesting life, but Denton’s fourth outing disappoints.Pub Date: April 28, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4135-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
