A pleasantly expressive story with two primary morals: You never know what will happen, and you can find support when things...
Fate works in mysterious ways, as a man with a lifelong passion for singing achieves fame at the age of 80.
This is a son’s memoir of life with his father and of his undistinguished father’s life well before the author was born. Though McDermott’s father, Ted, was not a successful professional singer and the author isn’t a professional writer, this story has a strong, sentimental pull, as the viral response to the videos of the father’s singing have attested. The elephant in the room is the Alzheimer’s to which it appeared the author had lost Ted. Though the family had been late to acknowledge it, Ted had become a totally different man: dangerously belligerent, accusatory, and denying there was anything amiss. “Alzheimer’s is a thief—it takes away all the light in family life and robs you of normality,” writes the author. “Even the shape of the word looks like it’s going to attack you. It strips you of precious moments and possible memories.” The narrative also pivots on an earlier before-and-after, the 40-plus years before Ted became a father, much of which he spent as a working-class singer on various bandstands, trying his best to support himself and perhaps delay the rooted responsibilities of adulthood. A crooner amid the rise of the Beatles, he saw this phase of his life come to an end when he impregnated a casual girlfriend and belatedly married her. The marriage that produced Ted’s only son was disharmonious throughout, but they somehow persevered through frequent arguments and occasional breakups. Then came the Alzheimer’s and the discovery that only through music could Ted reconnect with his former self. What followed was a video that went viral, a surprisingly successful fundraising campaign for Alzheimer’s support, a flurry of publicity and TV appearances by the son, a recording contract for Ted, and, now, this book.
A pleasantly expressive story with two primary morals: You never know what will happen, and you can find support when things are darkest.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1374-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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