A captivating portrait of a bygone time.
A tender recollection of growing up on a farm in Ireland in the 1940s.
In precise, vibrant prose, novelist Phelan (Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told, 2015, etc.) creates a finely etched portrait of his parents and siblings, assorted friends and relations, the bully who made his school days a misery, and many eccentrics, clergymen, and neighbors who peopled his small world. On a 52-acre farm in County Laois, the Phelan family’s house was heated by the kitchen fireplace, hot-water bottles relieved the beds’ cold dampness for most of the year, and dry overcoats were piled on as extra blankets. Every Saturday evening, a black, cast-iron pot was hung above the fire, heating water in which every family member bathed. “As a child, I believed that my family was poor,” writes the author, because unlike some other children, he rarely had money for small pleasures. Whatever luxuries they had—a chemical toilet, gramophone, and Brownie Box camera, for example—were the rewards of tireless, demanding toil by his father, “with his all-devouring work ethic,” and his mother, “the sheltering harbor from the storms that sometimes raged in Dad’s head and spewed out in loud and angry words.” Frustration, fatigue, and worry fueled those storms. “I remember him as a man who loved his wife and his children,” Phelan reflects, “who at times was driven over the edge while trying desperately to take care of them.” Being a farmer was not in the author’s future; instead, it was assumed he was destined for the priesthood, a vocation he did not question. He absorbed Catholic theology and developed a requisite sense of guilt about breaking the Ten Commandments as well as a healthy skepticism about the “Irish mania” for missionary work: “the conversion of happy pagans into miserable Catholics.” He reveled in being an altar boy, besotted by the lovely Sister Carmel, who made learning responses for the Latin Mass “a time of warmth, love, and delight.” Ordained in 1965, he left the priesthood after a decade.
A captivating portrait of a bygone time.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9709-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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