Lacking a stronger, schizophrenic conflict, Jacoby’s memoir tastes rather half-baked.
The memoir of a Catholic-trained atheist whose (ex-Catholic) Episcopalian father turns out to have been Jewish.
This memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacoby (Wild Justice, 1983) competently traces an inquisitive child's defiant search for her father's hidden background. The identity issue remains on the surface, largely a matter of culture and race—although there are some forays into history, examining the social restrictions of being a Jew in 19th-century America, for example, or the deadlier repercussions of being even a Mischling (a partial Jew) in Europe under the Nazi regime. There are precious few philosophical or theological elements present to give the story much in the way of depth, however, or to position it much higher than the average “should-I-celebrate-Christmas” stocking stuffer. Jacoby's major attraction to her father's buried past, outside of the usual adolescent obsession with questions of identity, appears to be a sincere identification with outsiders and victims. Many African-American friends attend her second marriage, for instance—a non-Catholic church wedding to a man with two atheist Jewish parents. As a talented young journalist, this small-town Midwestern girl meets many Jews and discovers for the first time that Jacoby is a Jewish surname. Jacoby (and her father to some extent) can, by the late 1960s, see their Jewish ancestry as an asset as well as a liability. Her father eventually admits the truth and turns the tables on his daughter by declaring that “identifying oneself as a Jew simply because Jewishness had acquired a certain social and professional cachet was just as opportunistic as denying one's Jewishness to escape social or professional stigmatization.” The gambling addiction of her Jewish ancestors adds some pathos to Jacoby’s memoir, but her identity problems lack the drama of others she mentions: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Catholic novelist Mary Gordon.
Lacking a stronger, schizophrenic conflict, Jacoby’s memoir tastes rather half-baked.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83250-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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