An endearing reminiscence that effectively relies on actual ideas considered over time rather than confessional feints.
Barbed yet charming memoir by the noted literary critic (The Truth About the Irish, 2000, etc.).
Growing up poor and Catholic in the rundown English city of Salford, he writes, “though you were a minority yourself, you were not brought up to prize the crankish or lovably idiosyncratic . . . or clamorously approve of him who stands alone.” Yet Eagleton maintained such an iconoclastic, inquisitive stance throughout his experiences with religious education, a stiflingly bad primary school, haughty Oxford, and ingrown leftist politics. His memoir is intriguingly organized into seven sections naming the intellectual and spiritual influences he encountered on his journey: “Lifers,” “Catholics,” “Thinkers,” “Politicos,” “Losers,” “Dons,” and “Aristos.” The “Lifers” were Carmelite nuns; ten-year-old Eagleton was their convent’s gatekeeper, the only lay male they encountered. This provided grounding for his skeptical adolescence, when he spent time in a grim seminary whose eccentric goings-on turned him toward more worldly pursuits. In “Thinkers,” he is unsentimental about his education: “I was a puny, livid-faced Oliver Twist among scabby-kneed roughs [who had] the sense of honor and blood-obligation of a Palermo pimp, and a range of experience as limited and repetitive as a fruitbat’s.” Despite this society’s animosity toward literary matters, Eagleton propelled himself into the scholarly life aided by Salford’s little-recognized cultural heritage and his own compulsive writing habits. His early academic successes allowed him to infiltrate the precincts of the moneyed and tenured classes, as well as the equally calcified Marxist left of the 1960s and ’70s; individuals in both groups receive humorous drubbings. Eagleton writes deftly, merging discussion of his simple beginnings and the passions that spurred him on through strife with genuine wit and a predilection for absurdist simile. Throughout, he remains attuned to prickly issues of class and achievement, laying bare the stratifications he witnessed in Anglo-Irish society.
An endearing reminiscence that effectively relies on actual ideas considered over time rather than confessional feints.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29122-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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