Talking to himself, Terkel is laconic, wry, sometimes baffling. He needs his machinery, his Sony and his Uher. ("I have a theory. I am a nco-Cartesian: I tape therefore I am.") He will reveal himself only as refracted through interviews with others, only in anecdotal banter. We learn in this memoir, a raggle-taggle patchwork, that Terkel was raised in his mother's Chicago hotel for transient men; there he learned to listen and to wait for the unforeseen moments when people reveal themselves. He learned from Civlization, the erudite dishwasher who regularly shot off "massive registered letters" to Ramsey MacDonald, Henry Ford, Leon Trotsky, Bertrand Russell, and "our city's most distinguished entrepreneur," Al Capone. He learned from the soapbox orators at Bughouse Square where "the colloquy was as convoluted as it was profound." He studied the underside of Chicago while running errands for petty gangsters and poll watching at rigged elections. Terkel admits to an abhorrence of confrontations or "scenes." Better to listen—though much of that listening is done during confrontations: on "jubilee day" in Montgomery, Ada., in 1965; in Chicago, 1968, where Terkel found himself locked in a hotel with Jules Feiffer, William Styron, and British journalist James Cameron. Though his peregrinations extend from Wales and Bertrand Russell—who will talk only about nuclear disarmament: "let them call me fanatic"—to the Artic Circle where a Swede asks him, "Mahalia Yackson. You know her?"—the inflections and sensibility here are all Chicago. Terkel keeps it taut all the way through; no solemnities, and much to laught at. He could make you believe that the world is populated by the cast-offs of Saroyan and O'Neill. Find yourself a corner and listen to him listen.
Pub Date: April 18, 1977
ISBN: 1565843193
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977
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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