A promising but uneven portrait of growing up in the expatriate world.
A Texas oilman’s daughter comes of age in the 1950s and ’60s while traveling the globe as part of an expatriate community.
Jensen’s debut memoir (Anatomy of an Infidelity, 2012, etc.) portrays a young woman’s literary and sexual awakening while including fascinating details about the rise of international oil refineries. Jensen draws on recollection and research to evoke the cloistral glamour of the expat world while depicting her family, including her ambitious, volatile father; her gentle, alcoholic mother; and her two older siblings, whose social grace underscores the narrator’s lack of ease. The book opens with her father’s decision to return his family to the United States from Venezuela in the 1950s; they move from Venezuela to Aruba to Spain to Pakistan to Thailand before finally returning to Texas. The author’s portraits are too cursory to rise to the level of great characters, but she includes riveting details of time and place, particularly when she juxtaposes the intimate and the cultural: Fourteen-year-old girls in Aruba steal cigarettes and Piper-Heidsieck champagne and swap stories of sexual initiation before news comes of President Kennedy’s assassination; college kids light up a joint in an Austin, Texas, bar and debate pot’s legalization as protesters are gunned down at Kent State University. Unfortunately, the memoir’s lack of focus undercuts its strengths. The book covers 17 years, from childhood to college, and all incidents receive equal attention, diluting the power of crucial events, such as Jensen’s aesthetic education; her friendship with Anne, whose expat home is a doily-and-china shrine to Queen Elizabeth II; Jensen’s sexual awakening at 15 with a 30-year-old engineer; and the untimely death of her friend John. At times, the memoir recalls Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) with its stories of hard-drinking eccentrics and thwarted ambitions. Ultimately, however, this memoir’s emphasis on summary makes it more a catalog of anecdotes than a rich, revealing story.
A promising but uneven portrait of growing up in the expatriate world.Pub Date: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456510398
Page Count: 440
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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