Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to...
A recollection of the people, the sights, sounds, smells—the feel—of a boyhood in a harsh and splendid time in America.
Hynes (The Soldiers’ Tale, 1997, etc.), now a near-80 professor emeritus (Literature/Princeton), was motherless at five. He grew up in various places until his father settled in Minneapolis and married again. The Great Depression, seemingly permanent, was at its nadir. It was a time when folks made do or did without. It was a hard time and, in many ways, a happy time, too. Kids might easily get into trouble, but not into danger. Many people never bothered to lock their cars or front doors. Each night, though, Sam’s father ritually latched his door. He was independent, striving, and never quite making it, married to a decent, frugal, hardworking stepmother to his two boys. As his son recalls him, his father was gentle and good. Trust the author’s memory. He remembers the seasons: the halcyon summer on a farm, culminating by a view of a stallion servicing a mare (“something heroic . . . like a parade or a brass band”), and the Minnesota winter, with laundry frozen on the line and snow that made distance evaporate. With him we play cops and robbers again (the little kids are the cops), listen to radio serials, graduate finally to long pants and discover jazz. We edit the high-school newspaper, take Manual Training, and encounter, fumbling, the opposite sex. The tale closes, not ends, as the nearly grown-up boy enters WWII. It is nothing really extraordinary, nothing uncommon; it’s just a story told with uncommon narrative skill. Past tense frequently gives way to present tense, present again in those youthful days now long past. It’s a work evocative for those who remember just which war was The War and instructive to everyone else. The trip to the author’s bountiful root cellar of memory is augmented with snapshots and clippings.
Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to be.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03193-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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